Conservation groups have accused a New South Wales agency of logging one of the last known strongholds of the greater glider, an endangered marsupial species, and urged the state government to intervene.
Bob Debus, a former Labor environment minister and now chair of the group Wilderness Australia, said there was overwhelming evidence that a Forestry Corporation of NSW logging operation was “smashing into the middle” of forest that was home to a large population of greater gliders.
Dr Kita Ashman, an ecologist with the World Wide Fund for Nature Australia, said researchers had recorded 96 greater gliders in the Tallaganda state forest east of Canberra over two nights of searching with spotlights last year.
The two groups have written separately to the environment minister, Penny Sharpe, and state Environment Protection Authority, calling on them to stop the logging and order an independent scientific survey of the 1,800-hectare (4,400-acre) area.
“It’s the only place I’ve ever seen where greater gliders were the dominant species,” Ashman said. “I’ve never seen anything like the density [of the population]. In most other places where greater gliders were once abundant they are disappearing. To know this habitat is being logged is extremely upsetting.”
The greater glider is Australia’s largest gliding marsupial. It was listed as endangered in 2022 after losing significant parts of its habitat to bushfire, drought, land-clearing and logging.
It was particularly badly affected by the 2019-20 bushfires, which damaged its habitat in Gippsland and NSW. Scientists say its population has fallen by about 80% in 20 years in some areas.
Forestry Corporation said the forestry operation in the Tallaganda state forest had been carefully planned under the rules that govern it. It said that included “intensive pre-harvest surveys” to identify and map “sensitive habitat and ecological features and retain wildlife habitat”, including connections into surrounding forest and parks.
The corporation said monitoring prior to logging involved “over 40 kilometres of spotlight transects and finding almost 400 greater gliders”. It said this showed that “active management of forests under these rules, in concert with surrounding protected areas, is supporting greater glider populations”.
Conservation groups said the permitting of logging showed environment laws were failing threatened species.
Ashman said WWF Australia had worked with scientists from the Australian National University and the University of Sydney over two years to protect greater gliders after the black summer bushfires nearly four years ago. The two projects, which cost $300,000, included installing specially designed nest boxes in trees and attaching GPS collars to animals in burnt and unburnt forest to examine how fire damage altered their behaviour.
She said the researchers “thought they had hit the jackpot” when they discovered the Tallaganda state forest glider population. “Aside from directly impacting the local population of greater gliders, the logging threatens the viability of the research that has been under way to protect the species,” she said.
Debus said he “felt very despondent about the circumstances we’ve discovered”.
“It suggests that the Forestry Corporation is yet again … vandalising the forest. Much of this timber is going to be used for wood chips,” he said. “This is massively important habitat for gliders and at the moment we’re knocking it to pieces.”
He said the true value of the forests was being kept as a carbon store, not being logged.
Sharpe did not respond before publication. An EPA spokesperson said environmentalists had not alleged current laws were being broken. “We will review the operations and will work closely with WWF and [the Forestry Corporation] on the matters raised to ensure appropriate outcomes are achieved,” they said.
Ashman said the Albanese government should quickly scrap an effective exemption from national environment laws for state-sanctioned logging. The federal environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, has said forestry will be covered by new national environmental standards as part of a revamp of the laws next year.
Both groups said NSW should join other mainland states in banning native forest logging, a step the state government has rejected. Labor governments in Victoria and Western Australia have promised to end the practice this year.
Labor’s conservation arm, the Labor Environment Action Network, has called for a national industry policy that ends native forest logging and focuses on restoring native forests and building an expanded, publicly owned plantation industry.
The proposal was backed by more than 300 Labor branches but not adopted at the recent party national conference. The party instead committed to rewriting its three-decades-old national forest policy statement.
