Nature NSW Summer 2024

Gary Dunnett, Chief Executive Officer

By the time this edition of Nature NSW is published the NPA office will have moved to a much smaller, shared space near Central Station.  The shift will help to reduce our overheads to an absolute minimum. 

In preparation we had to make some hard decisions about the NPA library.  A lot of the old textbooks and identification guides are long out of date and largely replaced by on-line sources.  What emerged as the indispensable core are all the reports and publications produced by NPA.  In pride of place is a full set of this journal along with all NPA’s new reserve proposals from the last seven decades. 

It is a humbling experience to look through those proposals.  Many parks we take for granted began as NPA new reserve proposals, from massive wilderness parks to tiny nature reserves.  A rigorous and respected way of building the case for new parks, and when coupled with our community and political advocacy, a highly effective one.

The common thread throughout these proposals is that they are built on the conservation values of the lands or waters in question.  Whether landscapes of natural character, cultural landscapes, havens for wildlife, flora and threatened species or gaps in poorly conserved bioregions, each proposal is justified by the natural and cultural values that will be protected.  

A proven model, but enough?  The negotiations about the final boundaries of the Great Koala National Park suggest that new factors are coming into play.  Despite the concept behind the park being to conserve a major stronghold for Koalas, it appears that a very different consideration is driving the final decision. 

What consideration? Carbon. 

The climate crisis has fostered a much greater appreciation of the role of natural ecosystems in the sequestration and storage of atmospheric carbon.  The best way of maximising the carbon capacity of forests is to stop logging them.  For that reason, forest campaigners stress the importance of forests in combating climate change.  In short, we’ve added a new environmental benefit to the establishment of national parks. 

There is, however, a potential problem, namely that any discussion of carbon capture inevitably brings debate about whether improvements should be factored into national carbon trading accounts.  That is precisely what has happened in the Great Koala National Park, with the NSW Government submitting a purpose designed Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) method to the Commonwealth for approval. 

The positive aspect is that the new ACCU should help the NSW Government to demonstrate that it makes far better economic sense to conserve the Great Koala National Park than to allow continued logging.  The same logic should apply to all public native forests and may well hasten the end to public native forestry in NSW. 

There is a troubling tendency for market factors to become utterly dominant in decision making.   For example, there has already been a statement by the NSW Premier to the effect that the final Great Koala National Park will hinge on the economics of the proposal.  The implication is that the market will determine the acceptability of the new park. 

The idea of a ‘triple bottom line’, the need to consider environment, economy and social issues, is hardly new.  Nor is the responsibility of governments to consider the consequences of their decisions for all sectors.  Yet semantics matter, and we do need to contest any suggestion that the future of our forests is solely dependent on market forces.  After all, isn’t that how we got into the current unsustainable situation?  

Where does this leave us?  On a practical level it means that our new reserve proposals and campaigning will have to be broadened to include carbon issues.  That in turns means that NPA will need to draw upon new skill sets to ensure that we remain an effective part of the debate.  At the same time, we need to resist all attempts to reduce future conservation outcomes to a financial calculation.  Our forests, our seas and our land are so much more than any ledger entry.     

In this edition