Overview of EPBC Act Regional Forest Agreement Exemption Sunset
The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water has confirmed a firm end date for one of the longest-running carve-outs in Australian environmental law. From 1 July 2027, forestry operations conducted under Regional Forest Agreements in New South Wales, Tasmania and Western Australia will lose their statutory exemption from the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth). The exemption, which has stood for roughly three decades, currently allows RFA forestry to bypass individual Commonwealth assessment on the basis that state-level forest management plans provide equivalent environmental protection.
For environmental practitioners, this is not a minor administrative update. It closes a regulatory gap that has separated timber harvesting from the assessment pathway applied to almost every other land use with potential impacts on threatened species, ecological communities or migratory species. Mining proponents, infrastructure developers and residential subdividers operating near or within former RFA regions have long dealt with full EPBC Act scrutiny of Matters of National Environmental Significance. Forestry operators in the same landscapes have not. That asymmetry ends in under two years.
The change matters to a broad client base including state forestry agencies, private timber companies, ecological consultants, and developers whose project sites sit adjacent to or within RFA boundaries. Anyone relying on the historical exemption as a planning assumption, whether in harvest scheduling, land acquisition due diligence, or biodiversity offset strategy, needs to revisit those assumptions well before the sunset date.
Key Requirements and Referral Timelines Under EPBC Reform
The sunsetting mechanism is delivered through the Environment Protection Reform Act 2025 (Cth), which repeals the exemption provisions that have historically operated through Section 38 of the EPBC Act in conjunction with the Regional Forest Agreements Act 2002 (Cth). Section 38 currently states that actions consistent with an RFA are not subject to Part 3 of the EPBC Act, which is the part containing the referral, assessment and approval requirements for actions likely to have a significant impact on MNES. Once the repeal takes effect on 30 June 2027, that carve-out disappears entirely, and forestry operations become subject to the same referral triggers as any other controlled action.
From 1 July 2027, any forestry action with the potential to significantly impact a listed threatened species, threatened ecological community, migratory species, wetland of international importance, or other MNES will require either an individual referral and assessment under Part 7 of the EPBC Act, or coverage under a new landscape-scale approval that DCCEEW is developing in parallel with the reform. The department has flagged that these regional or landscape-scale frameworks are intended to reduce the administrative burden of assessing thousands of individual coupes, but they are not yet finalised, and proponents cannot assume blanket coverage will be available in every RFA region by the deadline.
The species most likely to trigger referral obligations in the affected RFA regions include the Greater Glider (Petauroides volans), listed as Endangered following its 2022 uplisting, the Koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) in its New South Wales, Queensland and ACT population listing, and the Swift Parrot (Lathamus discolor), which breeds in Tasmanian forests and is listed as Critically Endangered. Field assessment for these species typically requires targeted survey effort across multiple seasons, particularly for the Swift Parrot given its reliance on flowering eucalypt phenology, meaning ecological consultants engaged late in the process may struggle to generate defensible presence/absence data within a single field season.
EPBC Act referral timelines are statutory rather than discretionary. A standard referral decision on whether an action is a controlled action is required within 20 business days, and where full assessment is triggered, timeframes for assessment and approval typically extend from three months for straightforward matters up to twelve months or longer for complex proposals requiring public comment, expert panel input or Commonwealth-state coordination. Harvest schedules built around annual coupe rotations will need to accommodate these lead times or risk operational gaps.
EPBC Act reform implications for Australian forestry and land management
For Australian environmental professionals, this reform effectively ends the long-standing regulatory divide between forestry and every other extractive or development land use assessed under national environmental law. RFA areas cover extensive tracts of native forest in NSW, Tasmania and WA, and the practical effect of the sunset clause is that state forestry agencies such as Forestry Corporation of NSW and Sustainable Timber Tasmania will need to build EPBC Act compliance capability that mirrors what large mining and infrastructure proponents have operated under for years.
This sits alongside existing state-level environmental protections rather than replacing them. State forest management plans, threatened species licensing under instruments such as the NSW Biodiversity Conservation Act 2016, and Tasmanian forest practices code requirements will continue to apply. The Commonwealth layer adds an additional, and in many cases more stringent, assessment obligation focused specifically on MNES, which state schemes were never designed to fully replicate. Practitioners advising forestry clients will need to run parallel compliance tracks rather than assuming state approval satisfies federal obligations.
The reform also has flow-on relevance for project sites adjacent to RFA forest, including rural subdivisions, quarry expansions and renewable energy developments that rely on referral precedents and cumulative impact assumptions shaped by the exemption. Once forestry within an RFA region becomes a referrable activity, the baseline against which cumulative impacts on MNES are measured will shift, and assessment documentation prepared for neighbouring projects may need to account for forestry operations as assessable actions rather than exempt background land use. Practitioners with projects in the pipeline through 2026 and 2027 should factor the transition into survey design, offset calculations and approval timelines now, rather than waiting for the sunset date to arrive.
References and related sources
- Primary source: www.dcceew.gov.au
- EPBC Act
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Published: 03 Aug 2026
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