New South Wales crossbenchers are threatening to withhold their support for legislation unless the Minns government moves to end native forest logging in the state, as greater glider populations remain at risk.
The Legalise Cannabis MP Jeremy Buckingham and Greens environment spokesperson, Sue Higginson, said it was time for the premier, Chris Minns, to take the issue seriously.
Higginson on Thursday said native logging was contentious within Labor, with many MPs and rank and file party members calling for a transition to logging only plantation forests.
Plantations grown specifically for timber production are generally a single species of tree and are considered less likely to be home to animals such as greater gliders than native forests.
Higginson said expert advice was that more lucrative timber products came from plantations rather than “our previous public native” forests.
“We know that the products coming out of our precious public native forest estates are not those high value products that people every day in NSW rely on,” she said.
It comes after weeks of community protests over logging in endangered greater glider habitat, including at Bulga state forest in the state’s mid-north, and the release of new community surveys that detected triple the number of gliders than what was recorded by the state-owned forestry agency.
Forest campaigners have called for an immediate moratorium on logging in greater glider habitat.
The Forest Alliance of NSW said current regulations are a “licence to kill” the species, whose populations have already plummeted in the aftermath of the black summer bushfires.
Their report, published on Thursday, said many of the 825 gliders they detected in four state forests where logging is scheduled could die because they would have insufficient protection under the state’s forestry protocols.
The data was gathered through on-ground and thermal drone surveys at Tallaganda and Tuggolo forests in the state’s south and Bulga and Styx River in the north.
There have been 16 arrests at Bulga state forest since campaigners began locking themselves to logging machinery about two weeks ago.
The forest alliance’s community surveys found 825 gliders across the four forests, while the Forestry Corporation of NSW’s surveys found 229.
The community surveys detected 170 glider den trees, compared to just 15 that were registered by the forestry agency. Den trees are significant because under state rules no logging is permitted within 50 metres of them.
The report estimated less than 1% of den trees were being detected by the forestry corporation under the conditions of its logging approvals.
Forestry Alliance of NSW spokesperson Justin Field called on the Minns government to save greater gliders from an industry that had “proven it cannot operate in our native forests without sending species towards extinction”.
He said it should not be up to citizen scientists to do work state agencies were failing to do.
“There is no doubt that a large proportion of the 825 greater gliders that the community has identified in these forests will be killed as a result of Forestry Corporation’s hopelessly inadequate procedures,” he said.
“The state government is knowingly complicit in this destruction whilst it refuses to halt logging in these areas.”
A Forestry Corporation spokesperson said: “The claim that over 800 greater gliders will not be protected and may die in the next few months is misleading and has no basis in fact.
“Forestry Corporation assures the community it is protecting the habitat for gliders.”
The report calls for an immediate moratorium on logging over all areas with a high density of greater gliders and for the Forestry Corporation to protect habitat at the location of all existing greater glider records – including records supplied by the community.
The veteran forest campaigner Susie Russell, who was arrested after locking on to machinery at Bulga last week, said the government was wiping out greater glider habitat while promoting its “nature positive” agenda.
“No one knows what they mean by nature positive if it doesn’t include protecting the known homes of our most iconic and endangered fauna,” she said.
Forestry Corporation’s spokesperson said the agency’s ecologists had spent “more than 196 hours completing 418 spotlight surveys for gliders across more than 128km of forest roads, tracks and trails”.
They said this supplemented existing protection measures under the Coastal Integrated Forestry Operations Approval, which required the agency to set aside trees with hollows irrespective of whether those trees are identified as dens.
“All areas of state forest that are harvested for timber are regrowth forests that have been harvested and regrown many times in the past,” they said.
“The fact that these forests continue to support strong populations of endangered species is testament to the effectiveness of the strict protection measures put in place by expert scientists.”
A Minns government spokesperson said the alliance report had “informed which trees need to be protected and the data on dens has been uploaded into Bionet”.
They said a consultation process was considering the future management of forestry operations, with an independent panel to advise on “how to best balance sustainable timber supply with environmental commitments”.
