Figure 1: Koala Injured by logging, Tarkeeth State Forest, Courtesy of Friends of Tarkeeth
Member Blog by Timothy Cadman
The Promise
The NSW Labor Party agreed to create a koala park over several electoral cycles from 2014.
This finally happened in March 2023, but logging continued within the park boundaries in both native forests and plantations, except a few so-called ‘koala hubs’ totalling around 4,000 ha of the 200,000 ha of state forest within the park in need of protection.
Koalas don’t read maps, and they go where the food is good and the water plentiful. Through a range of historical accidents this happened to be the lowland coastal forest, cleared for agriculture, then either returned to mixed species planted forest, seeded forest, and surviving forest. All this was zoned ‘plantation’ and was established from the 1960s onwards then left largely undisturbed until the mid 2000s.
Meanwhile, the native forest areas were continually logged, reducing their value as habitat, so the koalas moved into the plantations and adjacent forests.
Unfortunately, the NSW Greens, Nature Conservation Council, North-East Forest Alliance and National Parks Association made an accommodation with Labor, and the plantations were excluded from the park – even though they were identified as habitat in the initial study which led to the campaign to create the park.
This has left a park with literally hundreds of holes, constituting some of the best habitat, but available for clearing, urning, spraying and re-establishment as monoculture – a desert, and death sentence, for the koalas who live there – which could be as many as 2,000, or possibly even more. This constitutes more than 10% of the koalas identified across the park footprint by the government (but again, these koalas were not counted).
To make matters worse, the government is now holding the park to ransom by insisting that it be counted as a carbon ‘offset’ for the native forest logging industry. The plantations are not included in this deal, and can continue to be cut, and burned for ‘biomass’ energy, burned in furnaces and sold into the national grid as ‘green’ electricity. This includes rainforest, old growth and habitat, passed off as ‘logging residues.’
In short, the push for a park is actually driving the wild koala population on the NSW mid north coast closer to, not further from, extinction.
Within the plantations is a perfect mosaic of habitats for the koala – remnant forest with large and mature trees for home ranges and somewhere to go in times of fire, regrowth on the edges of the plantations suitable for browsing, and mixed species in the old plantations with three of the four favoured koala feed trees. In other words, perfect habitat.
But this is completely unprotected and available for logging, because it is ‘just plantation’. It is not even protected by the EPA as it is considered an agricultural resource and comes under the control of the Department of Primary Industry, which authorises the Forestry Corporation of NSW to log, and logging is contracted out to third parties, who supply local mills with native timber badged as plantation, wood-chips for export markets, pallet wood and tomato stakes, and some sawlogs. But the mills generally don’t want the planted timber.
This is a shocking example of an area of prime koala habitat that was recently cut, killing at least one koala, and when the timber arrived at the mill, the company didn’t want it, and it is rotting in the yard.
Figure 2. Proposed Greater Koala Park World Heritage Area, map of high conservation values. See legend. Tuckers Nob is to the south and west of Coffs Harbour. T Cadman
How did this happen? There is a deliberate strategy to cut this habitat before anyone except a few scientists and distressed residents can do anything about it.
Meanwhile, the government and NGOs know what is going on, but they look the other way. Yet research has shown that the plantations have a higher habitat value, and more habitat trees than either the state forest or national parks. But this makes no difference to those in power.
Consequently,
- The park, and its best habitat, is being logged to death.
- Even the koala hubs originally set aside for protection have been put back into the logging mix if they are zoned ‘plantation’.
- Original forest, which has survived since European colonisation is being cut down and sold as ‘sustainable plantation management’.
People are going into hardware stores and mills and being reassured that what they are buying is certified plantation timber, when it is not, and is the product of forest conversion, like the Amazonian and Indonesian rainforests that are being turned into plantations of soy, palm oil, or pulp wood.
This will continue until all the historical plantations are gone, and this is happening at a rapid rate.
The NSW Minns government has made the declaration of the park conditional on the allowance of the area to be counted as carbon offsets under the ‘improved native forest management’ (INFM) model of Australian carbon credit units (ACCUs), created to meet the country’s national commitments to emissions reduction under the Paris Agreement. But this model is deeply flawed.
Firstly, areas set aside as offsets have to be new (additional) to previous commitments to protection, or they don’t count under international accounting rules. There’s no point counting forests that would have been protected anyway, as there is no ‘additionality’ – i.e. no saved carbon.
While the ’NSW model’ must have reduced logging in a region where an offset project is established, this does not include ‘plantations’ and does not even count this logging as a source of emissions – the ‘waste’ that is burnt for green power actually counts as a carbon ’sink’ (storage opportunity) and gets sold into the voluntary carbon market to power companies promoting their environmental credentials – a process known as ‘greenwashing’. In addition, the INFM includes all sorts of projects, from good to bad – all end up in the markets and are available for purchase.
In other words, koala habitat gets rebranded as ‘carbon’ and is turned into an offset. But biodiversity (habitat) is not the same as carbon, it’s not, as the economic term goes, fungible. Apples can’t be turned into oranges. They are two different things.
The divergence between the spin and the situation on the ground is heartbreaking.
Koalas are still being killed, and habitat is still being destroyed, every day. In their rush to ‘end native forest logging’ the NGOs and their political allies have sacrificed the very animal they were trying to save, and by supporting the INFM are giving a lifeline to the very industry they claim to be shutting down.
Figure 3: Active clear-fell logging of known koala habitat within Viewmont State Forest, within, but excluded from NSW Koala park. Woodchips (bottom left) to be used for burning as green electricity. Airbus, Google Earth Pro
How did things get to this point? Firstly, no one really thought about the koala.
The idea for a park was a nice one, but ultimately, it was about securing what had been excluded from protection under the ‘regional forest agreement’ process of the 1990s. After other unsuccessful campaigns, regional NGOs hit upon the koala park, as the means to an end. Ending a highly destructive and unsustainable industry is laudable, but it should not be at the expense of the koala.
Secondly, no one really gave a consideration to good reserve design, either. A park full of plantations is like a Swiss cheese, full of holes.
Finally, and most depressingly, the proponent of the koala park thought that by having an insider track with government, they would get what they wanted. Tragically, they did, but it was not what the koalas needed, and they have been left out in the cold, to face the loggers on their own.
Figure 4: Area of mixed plantation with original forest, Tuckers Nob State Forest, Compartment 10. Green boundary = compartment; magenta boundary = plantation logging boundary in 2022; white = expanded boundary 2024. K = Koala sighting by thermal drone, KS = Koala scat. Note: Koala 8 is eating forest oak, one of the only reported records of this behaviour. T Cadman
To protect a species at the level required, it is necessary to think at a landscape level.
Everything must be connected and left alone. Koalas love a mix of forest types and ages; the one thing they don’t like is disturbance. So, any decent reserve must be large, and interconnected, with no gaps.
The habitat value must be high, not second rate, and for that reserve designers must think like koalas, not humans. At present the park does not meet the grade. It is a ‘national’ park in name only, created at a state level, for political, not environmental, or even cultural, reasons.
The community and the region’s Fist Nations people, the Gumbaynggirr, have had very little say. In May 2024, these local interests teamed up with koala researchers and spatial analysts to nominate a Greater Koala Park of 490,000 ha, for World Heritage status. This includes all the plantations, national parks and state forests in continual connectivity south-north from Kempsey to Grafton, and east-west from the Coffs Coast to the hinterland.
Ironically, once the government saw the strength of community opposition to the minimalist park it announced an extended boundary, raising the area proposed for protection from 316,000 ha to 464,000 ha, but still excluding the core habitat in the plantations.
So, two steps forward, and one step back. Meanwhile the koalas are hanging on by their claws – but only just.
Tim Cadman is an adjunct Senior Research Fellow at Griffith University and the University of Southern Queensland and a member of the Koala History and Sustainability Research Cluster.
Further reading
A home among the gum trees: will the Great Koala National Park actually save koalas?
Koalas, Climate, Conservation, and the Community: A Case Study of the Proposed Great Koala National Park, New South Wales, Australia.
https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/ijsq/13/1/ijsq130104.xml
Greater Koala Park World Heritage Proposal
https://greaterkoalapark.org/about-2/
Where are we going with Improved Native Forest Management and The ‘Great’ Koala National Park?
