BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM

The Great Koala National Park might sound like a place that’s too good to be true, but it is real. After more than a decade of campaigning, three state elections, and over 14 hours of parliamentary debate, New South Wales has established the state’s second-largest national park. It’s made up of 478,000 hectares (about 1.2 million acres) between Kempsey and Grafton on the Mid North Coast. More than 100 species of flora and fauna will be protected within its boundaries.

The park is a patchwork of existing protected areas stitched together with more than 178,000 hectares (roughly 440,000 acres) of former state forest and Crown Land. The legislation passed through approximately 160 amendments before it got there.

The campaign started small. Conservationist Ashley Love began lobbying for the park after hearing from local residents that koalas in the region weren’t as common as they once were. “It became too much to ignore,” he said. What started as a proposal to protect Crown Land eventually became a Labor election platform. NSW Labor took it to the 2015 and 2019 elections, lost both, and won government in 2023 on a ticket that included the park.

Carbon credits sealed the deal

Carbon credits were central to making the legislation work. The federal Clean Energy Regulator registered a project covering more than 117,000 hectares (about 289,000 acres) of the park’s state forest areas. By formally ending native forest logging there, the government can now sell carbon credits from the land. Protected forest, it turns out, generates more revenue than logged timber.

Of course, that trade-off still has real costs. The Forestry Corporation of NSW had already cut more than 30 jobs in Coffs Harbour as the logging moratorium ate into forward orders. Timber NSW president Andrew Hurford laid it out: “Staff have been laid off; engineering firms that provide support to those companies have no forward orders … downstream people supplying tyres, fuel, trucking, transport, engineering. All of those things are gradually becoming slower and quieter.” The government has committed to moving displaced Forestry Corporation staff into roles with the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

A park with gaps still to close

NSW Environment Minister Penny Sharpe called it “a defining moment for conservation in NSW,” and by the numbers, it qualifies. Love, whose decade of advocacy made the proposal viable, was more measured. “Its nature is quite fragmented, and there are gaps and connectivity issues between sections of it, but it is a big step forward,” he said.

Koalas need connected habitat to move, breed, and survive disease pressure. A 478,000-hectare patchwork is still a meaningful step up from what existed. The carbon credit structure gives the protected land a financial rationale that most past conservation campaigns lacked entirely. Love says he’ll keep pushing for the sections that didn’t make it in. After a decade, that sounds less like frustration than a habit he’s not planning to break.

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