Vic Jurskis
AAP reports that “At least 5000 koalas were killed in the 2020 Black Summer bushfires and a subsequent parliamentary inquiry found they would be extinct by 2050 without urgent government intervention to stop habitat loss”.1 Consequently, the Great Koala National Park will be finalised within weeks to ‘save’ them. Source: Australian Rural & Regional News
Australian Forest Products Association estimates that it will cost more than $1 billion and more than 2,000 jobs in the native timber industry. They’ve identified an alternative “acceptable” option which would cost only about $400 million and 700 jobs. The Government has allocated $80 million to establishing the Park.
Environment Minister Penny Sharpe said there were “a number of figures floating around … The thing I’ve learnt in forestry is that there are never any agreed facts and never any agreed figures”.2
But Sharpe says she will deliver “the government’s biggest environmental commitment”, adding that “We have always been clear that we need a comprehensive assessment process which takes into account environmental, economic, social, ecological and cultural issues”.
Unfortunately, this process has ignored the main issue. The Government’s own data from surveys using drones and sniffer dogs show that koalas are not endangered and there is no need for a new park.
There are more than 12,000 in the targeted 176,000 hectares of regrowth forests and plantations. That’s an unnaturally high density of one koala per 15 hectares.3 NSW’s native timber industry is doomed to follow Victoria’s and Western Australia’s into oblivion because the process is purely political and utterly lacking in science.
The Black Summer fires burnt a lot of koalas, more than one would expect given expert estimates of low numbers through most of their range. Their Endangered listing was based on an estimate of only 36,000 koalas in NSW before 5,000 or more were killed in the fires. The estimate for the whole north coast from the Queensland border to the Sydney Basin was only 8,000.
Now, with the imminent delivery of the Great Koala Park, three experts have published a scientific article claiming that it’s “dangerous to put numbers on koalas”.4 It says accurate numbers are not available, “Media seized on ‘guesstimates’ from any source, however dubious, and resorted to calculating numbers from habitat statistics and general population estimates without including the caveats that scientists included with these estimates…The obsession with numbers has left a legacy that can drown out the more considered narrative of science and lead to distortions of policy and management”.
Daniel Lunney, the corresponding author for this article, was also co-author of a ‘study’ which led to the Endangered listing. They concluded that, “It was not necessary to achieve high levels of certainty or consensus among experts before making informed estimates. A quantitative, scientific method for deriving estimates of koala populations and trends was possible, in the absence of empirical data on abundances”.5
Minister Sharpe now has real data which show that the experts underestimated koala numbers by an order of magnitude. CSIRO analyses6 also indicates that numbers are 10 times higher than Koala Industry guesstimates used to support the listing.7
But the Great Koala Park will go ahead despite huge cost to the environment, economy and society. The Black Summer fires were a consequence of our ‘Lock It Up and Let It Burn’ conservation paradigm. However, koala numbers continued to increase on the north coast and elsewhere despite losses in the fires.8
Accurate numbers from post-fire drone surveys of more than 5000 hectares in two areas near Goulburn and Cooma found koalas at an average density of one per 37 hectares.9 This is similar to densities near Campbelltown where koalas are measurably increasing and female home ranges are about 20 hectares. But researchers there fear the “dangerous idea” that koalas are sustainable at what they regard as low densities.10
These researchers “predicted” that a viable low-density koala population extends all the way from Sydney to Victoria through the South-Eastern Highlands. Their predictions are supported by the accurate post-fire surveys, though numbers are three times higher than they expected and obviously very much greater than the expert guesstimate of 1363 koalas for the whole bioregion.
No matter what the cost of the Great Koala Park it’s a scam and NSW’s Environment Minister has real numbers which prove it. Unfortunately, the numbers will no longer be politically dangerous once the park has been legislated and the renewable timber industry has been destroyed to appease the Greens.
Their claims of socioeconomic benefits have proved false after every major ‘environmental’ decision on forests since Premier Wran ‘saved’ sustainably logged rainforests in 1982. But we continue to use illegal timber got by destroying rainforests and orangutans.
References
- Australian Associated Press (AAP), At least 5000 koalas were killed, – Search
- Luke Costin, Australian Associated Press (AAP), Fur flies over billion-dollar koala park cost claims, 27 November 2024.
- Vic Jurskis, Ecological History of the Koala and implications for management, CSIRO Publishing, Wildlife Research, 12 December 2017, https://doi.org/10.1071/WR17032
- Eleanor Stalenberg, Daniel Lunney, Chris Moon, `It’s dangerous to put a number on them’. Media coverage of koalas during the 2019-2020 `Black Summer’ bushfires in Australia, CSIRO Publishing, Pacific Conservation Biology, 25 November 2024, https://doi.org/10.1071/PC24019
- Adams-Hoskings et al, Use of expert knowledge to elicit population trends for the koala (Phascolarctos cinereus), Wiley Online Library, Diversity and Distributions, 5 January 2016, https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.12400
- CSIRO, 2024 update of National Koala Population estimates, Progress Report, 15 April 2024.
- Jason Ross, CSIRO: Aussie Koala Numbers Are 10x Higher Than Estimate, Wood Central, 9 July 2024.
- Vic Jurskis, NSW Koala Strategy – Extinguish native forestry, Australian Rural & Regional News, 24 April 2024.
- Cristescu et al, Difficulties of assessing the impacts of the 2019–2020 bushfires on koalas, Wiley Online Library, Austral Ecology, 29 October 2021, https://doi.org/10.1111/aec.13120
- Robert Close, Steven Ward, David Phalen, A dangerous idea: that Koala densities can be low without the populations being in danger, Australian Zoologist, 1 June 2017, https://doi.org/10.7882/AZ.2015.001
Vic Jurkis is a former senior NSW Forestry Commission professional forester. In 2004 he was awarded a Fellowship by the Joseph William Gottstein Memorial Trust, to investigate eucalypt decline across Australia. He has published two books, Firestick Ecology, and The Great Koala Scam, both available from Connor Court.
