Most people don’t know there is a precious and potentially expanding koala colony on the edge of Sydney. After the devastating 2019-20 bushfires, the colony is regarded as critical to the survival of the species, which has been officially classified as endangered under state and federal biodiversity laws. Once city dwellers learn of this, they will want to protect their habitat. But how?
The Sydney Basin – stretching from Newcastle to the Blue Mountains down to Nowra – is bedevilled by threats from urban sprawl, mining and continued logging of native forest. Governments release koala protection plans, but still the trees – vital as food and shelter – are chainsawed and bushland bulldozed. In recent years NSW has experienced the “koala wars” as the National Party attacked environment protection laws, seeking to ensure the supremacy of development certain to whittle away the homes of koalas and the many other species which share our remnant natural areas. Can we ever stop death to our wildlife by a thousand cuts?
As Greater Sydney keeps growing we need to set boundaries. Total Environment Centre is proposing a Koala Green Belt and with WIRES recently launched a new organisation – the Sydney Basin Koala Network – to pursue this very goal, improved controls on tree clearing and annual reports on progress by governments. A crucial part of the project is sustainable corridors to allow the migration of koalas to areas still recovering from bushfires and to colonise suitable undamaged forest. There’s evidence of this happening in a small way while the bushland remains, but with the right protection policies it’s a sign we can achieve something magnificent – a major, thriving metropolis that looks after an endangered species.
The debate about koala corridors has been fraught, with developers and planning bureaucrats trying to minimise their width and downplay their importance. The NSW Chief Scientist has been called in and recommended the preservation of six corridors in the Macarthur region with an average 390 to 425 metres wide. Development interests played games with “average” so that some parts were quite narrow, seriously devaluing the utility of the few they would allow. Environmentalists and scientists were still campaigning to fix this when the NSW Planning Minister, Anthony Roberts announced 19,000 new homes.
His justification for fast tracking habitat clearance is the Cumberland Plain Conservation Plan, a legal instrument yet to receive the necessary consent from the federal Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek. The plan clears more rare Cumberland Plain Woodland (there is only 9 per cent of this left); puts most new conservation reserves off into the never-never allowing development to occur first; and fails to implement all the recommended corridors.
And then there is the reliance on offsets to smooth the way for mining and urban development. If you clear important bushland, you are allowed to conserve other land elsewhere. It matters little to decision makers that the Audit Office described the scheme as having, “risks that biodiversity gains made through the scheme will not be sufficient to offset losses resulting from development”. It’s fundamentally wrong to have a scheme where if you can’t afford to lose any of the original habitat, it still allows a replacement that cannot replicate what is being lost.
Of course a Koala Greenbelt and corridors are not only good for native plants and animals, but also for city dwellers. Total Environment Centre would like to see it linked in with the blue grid following rivers, creeks and green spaces providing a web of walking and passive recreational areas from the west to the eastern seaboard. The Government Architect has identified this system but we need an active mechanism to implement it.
Global warming is making cities hotter and less liveable. The more green spaces and tree canopy we have, the cooler air in the suburbs. By reducing heat we will use less fossil fuel energy in summer and have a lower carbon footprint. Green spaces help us adapt to and mitigate climate change.
Our endangered koalas are testament to blind development and weak environment protection rules. If we allow Sydney Basin’s koalas to prosper, rather than go extinct, future generations will thank us as they look up into the trees and see this beloved native.
