\u201cWe\u2019ve listened carefully and we\u2019re making sure workers, businesses, and communities are supported every step of the way.\u201d<\/p>\n
State officials contacted each affected mill, the Government said in a statement, vowing to provide payments to cover workers\u2019 salaries and business costs while offering free access to training, financial, health, and legal services.<\/p>\n
The state government first announced the planned koala haven in 2023 but it only stopped logging in 8400ha of forest. The plan was also criticised for not protecting trees immediately.<\/p>\n
The Great Koala National Park will provide a refuge to more than 12,000 koalas, 36,000 greater gliders – nocturnal marsupials with a membrane that lets them glide – and more than 100 other threatened species, officials said.<\/p>\n
The Government said it would invest A$6 million ($6.6m) to support new tourism and small business opportunities in the area.<\/p>\n
It also boosted funding to create the park by A$60m – in addition to A$80m announced in 2023.<\/p>\n
The koala park was hailed by environmentalists but criticised by unions for its impact on logging industry workers.<\/p>\n
\u2018Pro or anti koala\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cKoala numbers in NSW crashed by more than half between 2000 and 2020 thanks to deforestation, drought, disease, and devastating bushfires,\u201d said WWF-Australia chief executive Dermot O\u2019Gorman.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis park is a chance to turn this tragedy around and eventually lift koalas off the threatened species list by 2050,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese tall eucalypt forests are a climate refuge for koalas. Australia needs landscape-scale protected area networks like this to prepare for the possibility of 2.5 to three degrees of warming by the end of this century.\u201d<\/p>\n
When connected with existing national parks, the koala haven would create a 476,000ha reserve, the state government said.<\/p>\n
Unions said the koala reserve was far larger than the state government\u2019s own experts had advised, and it would hit local communities hard.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not about being pro or anti koala,\u201d said Tony Callinan, New South Wales secretary of the Australian Workers Union.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe all want to see koalas thrive. What we\u2019re against is the unnecessary destruction of an entire industry and the communities it supports when there is a science-based option that achieves both conservation and a viable timber industry.\u201d<\/p>\n
Final creation of the koala park will depend on the federal government agreeing to assess it as a carbon project for improved management of native forest, the state said.<\/p>\n
Australia\u2019s official national koala monitoring programme estimates there are between 95,000 and 238,000 koalas in the eastern states of Queensland, NSW and the Australian Capital Territory.<\/p>\n
Another 129,000 to 286,000 of the furry marsupials are estimated to be living in Victoria and South Australia.<\/p>\n
-Agence France-Presse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cWe\u2019ve listened carefully and we\u2019re making sure workers, businesses, and communities are supported every step of the way.\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9195,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[11582,85,11586,11581,1887,5232,11585,11591,71,11583,10918,10917,11589,3242,440,10919,3556,111,139,69,193,9224,8467,10665,11588,11590,147,11584,223,1316,406,102,10920,6730,11587],"class_list":["post-9194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-476000ha","tag-australia","tag-coast","tag-connected","tag-countrys","tag-create","tag-eastern","tag-extinction","tag-from","tag-halted","tag-haven","tag-koala","tag-koalas","tag-large","tag-local","tag-logging","tag-national","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-other","tag-parks","tag-population","tag-reserve","tag-retreat","tag-save","tag-science","tag-stretch","tag-the","tag-when","tag-wildlife","tag-with","tag-woodland","tag-would","tag-yesterday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}