<
https://news.mongabay.com/2025/02/an-australian-state-promised-to-turn-native-forest-into-a-national-koala-park-its-still-being-logged/>
"The koala was officially declared endangered in the Australian state of New
South Wales in February 2022. A year later, the Labor Party promised to create
a 315,000-hectare (778,000-acre) Great Koala National Park to protect the
iconic species in the state from extinction.
Labor went on to win the state election that year over the conservative
Liberal/National coalition, the latter half of which opposes the plan. The
koala park, however, still hasn’t materialized, and the forests proposed for
inclusion in the protected area continue to be logged.
There are already a scattering of national parks in this region of coastal
forest that host koalas (
Phascolarctos cinereus), most of them isolated from
each other by swaths of state forest. The idea behind the Great Koala National
Park, or GKNP, is to stitch together the 140,000 hectares (346,000 acres) of
national parks and 175,000 hectares (432,000 acres) of state forest into a
single, protected mosaic.
Yet two years on, this park still doesn’t exist, despite popular support from
ecologists and the local Indigenous Gumbaynggirr people, whose land comprises
one of the existing national parks in the region. In a statement to a 2020
parliamentary inquiry into koala populations, Gumbaynggirr community member
Michael Donovan said, “The Gumbaynggirr People fully endorse the Great Koala
National Park, and we’re working together with all relevant parties to ensure
their protection and preservation.”
The forest in the Coffs Coast region slated for the park hosts 150 threatened
animal and plant species, including the koala and the greater glider (genus
Petauroides), another endangered marsupial. The region’s native hardwood trees,
the target of logging operations, are ecologically significant, taking
centuries to form, says Grahame Douglas, president of the National Parks
Association (NPA), which has a statutory role in the National Parks and
Wildlife Council, a state body.
“From an ecological view, native forests are critical for hollows for native
species and require approximately 200 years to provide this function,” he said.
Yet the Labor-led NSW government has declined to consider a moratorium on
logging of native trees inside the park’s proposed boundaries during the
assessment period. While logging stopped six months after the 2023 election in
some areas, it’s been allowed to continue in others. Conservationists and
forest experts have raised the alarm that it has only intensified since then,
degrading koala habitat for the future park."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
