https://youtu.be/w8LiyaMs0xU
Twenty-two years in and there is little to celebrate in New South Wales.
The state is at the sharp end of climate change impacts, the sharp end of a pandemic and, the sharp end of the Koala extinction crisis.
In 2019-20 alone over 17 million hectares were burnt or impacted and more than 61,000 koalas killed, injured or impacted by fire in the east coast mega bushfire season.
More than than 5.3 million hectares were burnt or impacted in NSW, including 2.7 million hectares of national parks.
In NSW more koala have also been lost to widespread flooding and the stress of habitat loss as the NSW Government continues to allow an unsustainable level of land clearing.
A
total of 646,418 hectares have been approved for land clearing in the state between 9 March 2018 and 1 April 2022. The rate at which native vegetation was being cleared was over 61,00 hectares a year.
In 2020-21 the state-owned forestry corporation logged an est. 13,500 hectares of native forest and, as in the past, repeatedly logged in protected areas or known koala habitat.
Currently it is estimated that Australia-wide there may be as few as 43,000 koala left of the est. 7-10 million koala population calculated to exist in 1788. Almost certainly less than 80,000 koala.
In NSW there is some suggestion that the current number of koala left in the wild could be as low as <11,000 individuals in increasingly isolated colonies. Since the 2019-20 devastation of national parks, many of these koalas are now found on private land.
It should be noted that the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison federal coalition governments' support of the continued logging of New South Wales native forests between September 2013 to May 2022 had exacerbated the rate of land clearing/loss of native tree cover and the environmental impacts which flow from the removal of so many mature trees.
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