Thursday, 28 March 2024
Koala within Tuckers Nob State Forest: This habitat is now being logged
Dear Premier,
We hope you have had an opportunity to read and digest the contents of our journal article ‘Koalas, Climate, Conservation and the Community.’ If not, please find a link to the paper here:
https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/ijsq/13/1/ijsq130104.xml
This paper is an independent assessment of the situation confronting the Koala in New South Wales, and within the footprint of the proposed Great Koala National Park (GKNP).
As expressed in our previous letters, we continue to be deeply concerned that a flawed decision-making process will compromise the effectiveness of the GKNP. The exclusion of the hardwood ‘plantations’ from the park is a critical error, as is the failure to investigate World Heritage values. These decisions effectively end the viability of the park as a refuge for koalas.
Many of the areas currently zoned as plantations have higher conservation value than the surrounding areas zoned native forest. They provide high quality, high usage koala habitat. We estimate that the majority of the areas currently zoned plantation are in fact natural forest, such as post-logging regrowth, failed plantings and original forest. NSW is the only state to classify natural forests as ‘plantation’. The planted forests themselves are de facto native forests as they were mixed species and established using local stock.
The process for defining the proposed GKNP failed to take into account a spatial analysis of historical aerial photography delineating remnant forest within plantations. It also failed to acknowledge the significance of the forest in, and between, the plantations and the assessment area. These are fundamental errors of methodology. Buffer zones are an essential component of park assessments – allowing logging in, or adjacent to, high value habitat will result in significant koala deaths. Nor can plantations solely function as corridors and links. Koalas need extensive, diverse, intact forest to find enough food to survive, not fragmented pockets connected by thin slivers of retained habitat.
Ensuring that the GKNP meets the requirements for a World Heritage site would significantly enhance the reputational standing of the government’s conservation commitment internationally and ensure that the proposed park meets the highest standard for a park of genuinely global quality. This is the benchmark needed to ensure a successful and effective GKNP.
As a matter of urgency, we ask that you:
* instruct your Ministers and agencies to immediately investigate the boundary forests adjacent to the assessment areas, and authorise the Parks Service to make the necessary jurisdictional adjustments to ensure these high value areas are included in the evaluation process.
* instruct the Parks Service to make use of the historical aerial photography, appropriately orthographically rectified to identify these areas, and undertake ground-truthing. This is also urgent, as our own preliminary investigations indicate that hundreds, possibly thousands, of hectares of habitat of higher quality than currently under assessment, may be omitted.
* initiate an assessment of the proposed park against the World Heritage criteria.
We continue to applaud the decision to create this park, and hope that you will be able to rectify these methodological errors as soon as possible in order to ensure that the park is more than an empty gesture, but a truly effective world-standard park protecting NSW koalas now and into the future.
As koala experts everywhere know – koala habitat is whatever habitat koalas use, irrespective of what we label it. We hope you’ll accept their advice on what koalas need to secure their future.
Sincerely yours,
Dr Rolf Schlagloth, CQUniversity*#
Dr Tim Cadman, Griffith University*
Prof. Fred Cahir, Federation University*
Prof. Ian Clark, Federation University*
A. Prof. Danielle Clode, Flinders University*
Dr Gabrielle McGinnis, University of Newcastle*
Dr Flavia Santamaria, CQUniversity*
Dr Michael Danaher, CQUniversity*
Dr Ed Morgan, Griffith University
Dr Michael Hewson, CQUniversity
Prof. Barry Golding Federation University (signed after letter was emailed)
*Koala History and Sustainability Research Cluster #Correspondence
CC: Ministers Sharpe, Moriarty
timcadman 