The Bellingen Environment Centre and the North East Forest Alliance have denounced the state government’s new koala strategy, saying it totally ignores the proposed Great Koala National Park and calling its identification of priority reserves in state forests a sham.
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“Koala populations have collapsed by 50 per cent in the last 20 years and the government’s response is to propose protection of small fragmented reserves generally in the steep hinterland on the North Coast containing marginal koala habitat,” Ashley Love from the BEC said.
NEFA spokesperson Dailan Pugh said it seemed Forestry Corporation were simply allowed to chose the forests they didn’t want, rather than identifying and protecting the highest priority koala habitat.
"For example, while it’s good to see the 3000-hectare Mount Lindesay State Forest made into a reserve, with 67 per cent of it affected by Bell Miner Associated Dieback, only eight per cent identified by 2017 DPI mapping as high quality koala habitat and ten records of koalas in the past 17 years, it is a poor choice as a high priority koala reserve.
"Given Mt Lindesay's extreme and ongoing degradation it is not an appropriate or safe area to release koalas into.”
Ashley Love said the strategy ignored the benefits of combining a koala hospital with the proposed Great Koala National Park Visitor Centre on the Pacific Highway at Pine Creek.
“The government is failing to support genuine koala conservation and ecotourism opportunities, and short-changing the Coffs Coast community,” he said.
“We welcome transfer into national parks of a small area in Oakes State Forest on the basis that it is in the steep and rugged upper headwaters of the Kalang River west of Bellingen, has highly erodible soils, heavy rainfall intensity and is a headwater area of the catchment that should be protected.
“Unfortunately, this seems to be the key approach of the strategy: to protect areas that are already unwanted by the logging industry due to their isolation, erodability or degradation. This means that the strategy delivers minimal conservation gains, and is an inadequate response to the scale of the problem.
“In contrast, the Great Koala National Park would protect koala habitat identified as some of the most significant in Australia and at great risk from intensive logging. It would be a globally significant network of national parks, befitting a globally significant species.”
