The lack of a place to live because of the pressure on land, droughts, fires, and floods, are all increasing as a result of the impacts of climate change and continue to affect lives, and the future, yet the NSW state government still refuses to take decisive action.
They failed to declare a Great Koala National Park (GKNP) they have allowed NSW Forestry Corporation to continue to log key koala habitats and koala hubs even though they have been fined multiple times for failures to protect known habitat required under the legislation.
The latest modelling by the NSW state government on koala densities has been called into question by North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) which identified areas the model had identified as ‘to have higher densities of koalas than the GKNP’ to be actually bare farmers’ paddocks.
As Nature Conservation Council Deputy Chief Executive Jacqui Mumford pointed out in 2022, ‘If you want to save koalas you have to protect their trees’.
‘It is not complex. But koala habitat continues to be destroyed because of weak government policy that prioritises land clearance for grazing, agriculture, urbanisation, timber harvesting and mining,’ she said.
NSW Labor first promised the GKNP in January 2015 as they went into the election, yet over ten years later the electorate is still waiting for them to fulfill their promise – and they wonder why the community loses trust in governments.
The fight to preserve koala habitat is just the overarching debate. The reality is that if you preserve koala habitat, the benefits are myriad. It is not just the koalas that are protected. It is the other endangered animals and native wildlife that also gains protection. From greater gliders, glossy black cockatoos, powerful owls, possums, wombats, quolls, and various reptiles to critically-endangered ecological communities, to rivers and waterways as well as facilitating climate change mitigation.
A good first step is actually creating the GKNP and stopping the loggin of native forests in NSW just like they have already done in Victoria and Western Australia.
Then they also need to actively seek out other ways to create connectivity between existing, proposed and future sites of national parks, state forests and private land. One local suggestion is the new Richmond River Koala Parks that have been proposed to safeguard critical habitat.
Local communities calling on the NSW Government to permanently protect 56,200 hectares of State Forests in the Richmond River Valley and along the southern Richmond Range. This population of koalas is genetically distinct from those in the proposed GKNP and the proposed area is also home to over 130 other species threatened with extinction due to habitat loss and climate change.
‘Protecting these forests from logging is not just about providing a lifeline for Koalas and a plethora of other struggling wildlife, it’s about restoring ecosystems and the health of the Richmond River,’ NEFA’s Dailan Pugh told The Echo.
‘We urgently need to stop releasing the carbon stored in forests by logging, and instead enable them to draw down and store the millions of tonnes of CO₂ released into the atmosphere by past logging. Our forests need time to heal – not further destruction.’
It is time for the NSW government to stop sitting on its hands and take action to protect our endangered wildlife, our ecological communities; and be on the front foot to use this as a means to protect our children’s futures in relation to the impacts of climate change
Aslan Shand, editor
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