Gary Dunnett, CEO and Kate Carroll, Conservation Projects Officer
Some of NPA’s deepest roots lie in the forests that cloak the landscapes between the Great Dividing Range and the rugged southern coasts. These are contested regions whose economy relies upon nature-based tourism, while allowing the very worst of industrial clear-felling and woodchipping.
NPA has been calling for a shift from exploitation to protection of the southeast forests for decades. The long history of the forest campaigns is documented in David Gallan’s wonderful 2016 documentary ‘Understorey’.
Those campaigns had significant successes, including the creation of parks such as Southeast Forest National Park. The parks that were established as part of the original Eden and Southern Forest Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) negotiations were a great beginning, but are not enough to truly secure the biodiversity values of the forests.
NPA and other conservation groups expected that the planned reviews of the RFAs in 2017/18 would provide an opportunity to revisit the most critical gaps. After all, several threatened species were continuing to decline and the contribution of land clearing to climate change was becoming all too clear.
In anticipation of the reviews NPA joined a coalition of organisations committed to protecting the public native forests of the Southern and Eden RFAs from further logging. NPA stalwarts such as Mike Thompson played a critical role in bringing together a vision to deliver on biodiversity, carbon and all the social and economic opportunities of intact, biodiverse forests.
Shockingly, rather than assessing the shortfalls of the original RFAs, the Morrison Government, in 2018, simply extended the Eden and Southern Forest RFAs for another 20 years.
A ‘nothing to see here’ decision that came barely a year before these forests changed forever. The summer of 2019/20 brought fires of unprecedented scale and intensity that swept the southeast with devastating consequences for communities and nature alike.
The shocking aftermath demanded a reckoning, an honest appraisal of the impact of the fires and how we ended up in this situation. Despite the inevitable calls for large scale clearing and hazard reduction, most attention turned to the impact on human lives, forest fauna and forest habitats. Our previous confidence that species would rarely be threatened with extinction by fire was replaced with a chilling picture of massive species loss and forested ecosystems damaged beyond recognition.
There were two really important take home messages from those fires. The first was that the species that call the forests home are far more vulnerable than realised. In a world where mega fires can enflame hundreds of thousands of hectares, it’s not enough to have a few well managed reserves sprinkled across the landscape. To retain refugia for post-fire species survival, we need large, well connected and geographically diverse reserves.
The second message was that retaining forests in natural condition is one of the most effective means of combating the underlying causes of anthropogenic climate change, carbon emissions. This realisation neatly bridged any perceived gap between biodiversity and climate advocacy – the reality is that healthy forests deliver on both fronts.
The fires resulted in many conservationists calling for the end of logging in public native forests. Those calls became more urgent when the NSW Government changed in 2023.
So where does this leave NPA and the Southern Forests? NPA will continue to support the broad call for a state-wide end to logging in public native forests. But we can do much more, largely by leaning into our long-established practice of preparing carefully documented, scientifically sound, proposals for new national parks. This is exactly what NPA did in preparing the Great Koala National Park report, which the now Government took to the last two elections as their signature environmental policy.
The challenge is to build an equally compelling case for the Southern Forests.
This proposal is not intended to undermine the broader call to end all logging in public native forests. That outcome remains NPA’s strong preference. What this project is doing is recognising that governments will often baulk at major change, and instead move towards transformation through a series of smaller steps.
The reality is that we have every expectation that the final proposal for these southern forests will be of an extent that effectively brings industrial forestry in these landscapes to an end. However, our arguments for the new parks will be built on the species, habitats, ecological communities and natural processes that require protection.
Equally importantly, the project is about showing what is on offer in the creation of a big new national park. In other words, just as with the Great Koala National Park, shifting the focus on what the community gets, rather than what the forestry industry loses.
I am delighted to report that we are making real progress, and aim to present a formal proposal to Government in the first part of 2025. Our hope is that the Southern Forest additions will be adopted by the NSW Government before the next State election.
Figure 1 shows a map of the project study area. Kate Carroll, NPA’s Conservation Projects Officer, is working in close collaboration with Far South Coast Branch, Coastwatchers, Milton Branch and Illawarra Branch. Kate brings extensive biodiversity survey, assessment and mapping expertise to the project. Her initial analysis of vegetated ecosystems in the relevant IBRA bioregions is already showing deficiencies in the adequacy of existing national parks and suggests that transferred State Forests would significantly improve the resilience of the forests. These investigations will be followed with detailed analysis of threatened species and other conservation attributes.
A big difference between this project and the Great Koala National Park is that we are assessing a wide range of conservation values, not just a single threatened species or group of species. It’s an important distinction, one that ensures a really solid foundation for the new park proposal, based on international best practice.
The project’s ultimate aim is to demonstrate that the transfer of State Forests into the Protected Area Network will materially increase the comprehensiveness, adequacy, representativeness, resilience and connectivity of the forest estate and its biodiversity. The report to government will complement these biodiversity outcomes with assessment of the social, economic and carbon benefits of moving to a conservation model.
The project team will provide regular updates to NPA members and supporters through Nature News.
