Displaying items by tag: national parks

Lane Cove National Park will be expanded, albeit marginally, with the addition of 0.6 ha near the river at North Ryde near the Epping Road bridge below the business park.

The announcement from NSW Environment Minister Gabrielle Upton states that it will help foster habitat and threatened species along the river. The threatened species include Darwinia biflora, a shrub only found in Sydney’s northern suburbs. Weeds are a problem in this area because of the steep terrain.

It is estimated that there are fewer than 21,000 koalas left in NSW. The population may have reduced by more than a quarter over the past 20 years. The species is listed as vulnerable to extinction under the federal EPBC Act in NSW.

The major reason for the decline is habitat loss with the worst areas being in the Pilliga and South Coast. NSW is a heavily cleared landscape. Almost 40% of native forests and bushland has been removed since European settlement, and only 9% of remaining vegetation is in close-to-natural condition.

Eastern Australia is one of the world’s top 11 deforestation hotspots, along with the Amazon, Borneo and the Congo according to a report prepared by the NCC and WWF. Between 1990 and 2016, at least 2 million hectares of forest and bushland in NSW have been destroyed out of the total state area of 81 million hectares.

So what is being done about this? There are a number of decisions over recent years that will make the situation worse:

1. As a result of the new biodiversity laws implemented in 2017, 99% of identified koala habitat on private land can be bulldozed.
2. Last November the government commenced new logging laws called Integrated Forestry Operations Approvals. The laws reduce protections for forest wildlife, including koalas. One of the worst changes is the introduction of an intensive harvesting zone over 140,000 ha of coastal forest between Taree and Grafton. The intensive harvesting zone will see large-scale clear-felling legalised on the north coast for the first time. Because most of the trees will be gone, it’s likely that most of the koalas will be too!
3. In December the Premier Gladys Berejiklian gave the green light to renew the Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) with the Commonwealth for another 20 years. RFAs are the mechanism by which the states are permitted to log native forests under accreditation from the Commonwealth. They are meant to balance the needs of the logging industry with conservation and public recreation. Conservationists argue that the RFAs have not been properly reassessed with a thorough scientific analysis of the values of native forests, for example for carbon storage and enhancement of catchment water.

NSW Koala Strategy

One positive development, albeit with limitations, is the government announcement last May of a strategy aimed at securing the future of koalas in the wild. $45m has been committed. It involves:

• setting aside 20,000 ha of state forest as koala reserves on the Central Coast, Southern Highlands, North Coast, Hawkesbury and Hunter
• transferring 4,000 ha of native forest on the North Coast to national parks
• allocating $20m to purchase prime koala habitat that can be added to national parks

However the strategy fails to commit to protecting areas known to be home to koalas from a major intensification of logging in state forests under new IFOA laws.

In early February 2019, as the election looms, some parts of the strategy have been implemented. A cattle property once used as a recreational dirt motorbike and horse recreation area has been bought by the NSW government to become part of the first national park to be gazetted in NSW in 11 years. It borders the Wollondilly River in the Southern Highlands and is about 3,680 ha. Actually 1,150 ha of this land is already protected so the addition is only 2,164 ha. There is no information about how much of this area is currently cleared and degraded from its previous use. How long before it becomes genuine koala habitat?

Great Koala National Park is a Better Idea

The National Parks Association has developed a proposal that will provide definite security for koala populations. This is for a 175,000 ha Great Koala National Park on the NSW mid-north coast, new national parks for the last remaining koala populations in southwest and western Sydney, or new national parks in other areas of known koala significance. The choice of the north coast has been confirmed as most effective by studies completed by the Office of Environment and Heritage, copies of which were obtained under Freedom of Information laws.

Funding Announced for Improvements to Popular National Parks

Another government announcement is for a $150m investment to improve access to existing national parks that includes upgraded walking tracks, better visitor facilities and new digital tools such as virtual tours and live-streaming cameras. The main investment is in the Blue Mountains and Royal National Park where visitor numbers have increased rapidly. This is all aimed at the tourist dollar, not conservation that is meant to be the main purpose of national parks.

Will there be an increase in funding for the National Parks and Wildlife Service to look after the additional reserves? After the massive cuts in funding of the service highlighted in previous issues of STEP Matters one wonders!

Removal of Feral Horses from Kosciuszko National Park has been Stopped

In December the NSW Threatened Species Scientific Committee declared feral horses to be a key threatening process because they place dozens of species at risk closer to extinction. In response a spokesman for Environment Minister Gabrielle Upton said the government was preparing a plan of management that would:

identify the heritage value of sustainable wild horse populations and set out how those will be protected while maintaining environmental values.

That goal will be impossible to achieve.

Meanwhile, in response to the passing of the Wild Horse Kosciuszko Act, the number of feral horses being removed by current methods has been reduced to nil since August 2017 even though the Act was not passed until June 2018. The Invasive Species Council has obtained data showing that the peak number of removals was 600 in 2012.

The Nationals Parks and Wildlife Service in 2016 estimated there were 6000 brumbies in Kosciuszko National Park. Scientists estimate the population may grow by up to 20% a year. The drought though is believed to have curtailed brumby numbers.

Labor has committed to repeal the legislation to protect the brumbies.

It seems a long time ago when the NSW public were fighting an attempt in 2013 by the Shooters and Fishers Party, supported by the NSW government, to allow amateur hunters into national parks. Hunting has been permitted in state forests since 2002 but there was much more at stake with national parks. There was strong opposition on many grounds particularly its effectiveness in removing feral animals.

Ultimately the government decided to scale back the proposal and do some proper research on ground shooting as a method of controlling feral animal populations. In 2014 it instituted a trial of hunting in six park areas mostly in central and western NSW that contained threatened species and ecological communities. The trials were to be scheduled and managed by the NPWS.

The final report by the Natural Resources Commission into the trial of the so-called Supplementary Pest Control (SPC) was released in February 2017.

The SPC trial has shown that using appropriately trained and capable volunteer ground shooters can deliver positive pest management outcomes and social benefits, such as improved relationships and communication between NPWS and their neighbours. The trial has also demonstrated that volunteer ground shooting can be done safely and humanely when sufficient risk management, supervision and planning are undertaken. The Commission has concluded that volunteer ground shooting has the potential to be an effective supplementary pest control technique in the state’s national parks and other reserves, if used as part of an integrated pest management program under controlled conditions.

The Commission recommended that the SPC program be continued with it being strategically applied where it can provide most benefit as part of an integrated pest management program. The Commission also recommended that additional funding be allocated separate from NPWS core pest management budget. A happy ending to a sorry saga.

The last two issues of STEP Matters (Our National Parks Need Protection and Fifty Years of the NPWS but is Anyone Celebrating?) have described the savage treatment being applied by the NSW government by cutting national parks funding and staff restructuring. This is despite a huge increase in the popularity of parks revealed in a regular survey undertaken by the NPWS. Since 2014 the number of visits to NSW national parks by Australian residents has increased from 39.1 million to 51.8 million, a massive 32% in just two years.

The significance of the restructuring policy has been brought home by the loss of Michele Cooper who has been Lane Cove Valleys Area Manager for five years. This profile of Michele has been written by Tony Butteriss, President of the Friends of Lane Cove Valley.

Friends is very disappointed to hear that Michele Cooper has not been reappointed to her role in the restructure of NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. We will miss her professionalism, advice and personality. We wish Michele the most for her future and as she said recently, ‘we have so much more to do and achieve, I want another 50 years’.

Outgoing Area Manager, Michele Cooper came from an interesting background. She arrived at Lane Cove River Area as a ranger in 2001. Her degree is in physical geography with a master in limestone cave management but she insists she gained her skills on the job. She managed the Pennant Hills additions, Dalrymple Hay Nature Reserve (her favourite spot) and the Kukundi Wildlife Shelter.

The value of Lane Cove National Park – according to Michele – is in having pockets of bushland within a massive metropolitan city. She values her staff and the volunteers that are dedicated to environmental work. Her typical workday is diverse, needing her attention across a range of tasks: a school group wanting a tour ... what spider is this … can I run an event with 3,000 people … a tree fallen over a track … where can I go camping? And of course – bush fires.

Her special achievement at NPWS was her Aboriginal Tour Guide Training Manual. It trained Aboriginal people to give tours in national parks. After she led the first training program, TAFE and NPWS ran numerous courses using the manual. Since then some land councils have used her manual to set up tour guide businesses.

Before Michele joined NPWS, she taught whale rescue skills to NPWS staff at the Quarantine Station on North Head. She got on so well with staff that they asked if she would volunteer. She joined NPWS doing fauna surveys in western NSW in the mid-1990s. Her next job was gate-collector for Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. She returned to western NSW for 10 years conducting fauna surveys off-park on lands that were viable for adding to the reserve system. In Sydney, Michele was a ranger and also regions community relations officer before becoming area manager for Lane Cove. We have just lost a manager with over 25 years of highly commendable work with NPWS.

Another round of ‘restructuring’ has hit our national parks staff. More managers and rangers with superb skills and experience have to reapply for the jobs they have been performing under extreme pressure from previous cutbacks. It is clear that the Department of Planning and Environment does not value ecological skills any more. Nobody knows what the selection criteria will be for the new positions – tourism experience perhaps?

A group of former NPWS employees has formed a group called Park Watch to monitor the impacts the cuts are having. There is a forum on 30 November at NSW Parliament House to discuss the future of national parks.

Carolyn Pettigrew, one of the members of Park Watch presented a talk on ABC Radio National’s program Ockham’s Razor. Here is a transcript reprinted with permission from Carolyn.

Introduction from Robyn Williams

Conservation. It's a word that sounds a bit like conservative, doesn't it? But the conventional wisdom these days is that environmental matters are green - green in philosophy and probably green in politics. But this didn't used to be the case. When I went to my first meeting of the Australian Conservation Foundation in the early 70s, the president was not Peter Garrett, who would have been about 20 at the time, but Prince Philip. And back then the president of the United States, Richard Nixon, he of tainted memory, was behind some of the most far-reaching environmental initiatives which in 2017 are steadily being dismantled by Donald Trump. So what about our own national parks, where did they come from, and why should we care.

Carolyn Pettigrew

2017 is the 50th anniversary of NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. Born out of the Land Department's Parks and Reserves division and the NSW Fauna Protection Panel, it was largely the brain child of a Liberal politician, the Hon Tom Lewis.

The service's 50th birthday is a cause for celebration - as some of its achievements are really outstanding. The declaration of the Border Ranges and Blue Mountains National Parks as world heritage regions must be among the highlights, signifying the importance of these areas not only to Australia but the world.

National parks and reserves represent the highest level of protection available to our unique fauna and flora, and are vital to their survival. They are becoming even more important as threatening processes outside the reserve system put pressure on our remaining natural ecosystems. Unfortunately, the ability of our national parks and reserves to protect this natural heritage is being eroded - both within and outside the parks.

The National State of the Environment Report 2016 states that the threatening pressures on biodiversity include land clearing, invasive species, the fragmentation of habitat, changed fire regimes, and climate change.

Most of these exert a high or very high pressure on biodiversity, and are worsening. The cumulative and interacting effects of these pressures amplify the threat to biodiversity in Australia.

Excessive land clearing poses a particular threat.

It certainly surprised me to learn that Australia has a land clearing rate similar to Brazil and Indonesia. Queensland alone has cleared more than one million hectares of woodland in the past 10 years, and New South Wales looks set to follow suit.

In 2013 the NSW Government developed a program called Save our Species (SOS). This program provided the framework for identifying threatened species and what was needed to ensure the survival of threatened species for the next 100 years. It made sense of all the efforts being made by various environmental groups, communities, academic institutions, and the government to halt the loss of species. SOS identifies where the gaps are and ranks the importance of the work needed. Importantly, there is some funding available for groups to carry out the work required.

Backing the SOS plan was legislation designed to protect biodiversity and to halt the loss of habitat on land outside the reserve system. This system of protecting against land clearing wasn’t perfect - but it was crucial to making the SOS plan work.

Unfortunately, it was met with hostile opposition by powerful agri-business and political voices, so instead of modifying the rules the NSW government threw out the legislation.

What we're left with is legislation which is little more than a self-assessment process. If you read what a landholder can clear on their land it is virtually everything.

The loss of habitat that allowed some species to hang on and connect with nearby habitat will be devastating. The remnant koala population in northern NSW is a case in point - trees on private land and roadsides are being cleared at an alarming rate. These koalas seem destined to disappear.

Local citizen scientists, conservation groups like Birdlife Australia and the Australian Wildlife Conservancy and concerned landholders are all doing a magnificent job despite the odds but what are our governments doing?

Which brings me back to national parks and reserves. In NSW about 9% of the total land area is reserves of one kind or another. Not all threatened species depend on national parks and reserves but a hell of a lot most certainly do.

There are huge gaps in what we know about threatened species, their location, habitat requirements and distribution.

Very broadly, threatened species management in national parks and reserves fall into two categories – site-managed species like the Mallee Fowl and landscape managed species such as the threatened Powerful Owl. If I take the latter example, Powerful Owls are top predators. They feed mostly on arboreal mammals – possums of various kinds. That means they need tall forests with lots of hollow trees which also meet the requirements of other threatened species such as the yellow-bellied glider. So the land is managed at the landscape and ecological community level to cover as many species as possible.

Threatened plants and animals are identified in plans of management for a reserve. But there are a multitude of management objectives for each reserve. Making sense of the different priorities, the capital works and the human resource deployment needs professional park managers like graduate rangers and specialists.

You might think we have an army of these people but we don’t. Despite the fact that these are the folk who provide the intellectual grunt in reserve management their numbers are dwindling due to cut after cut. Every time you hear those words efficiency drive or restructure - think job losses. NSW has lost 30% of rangers over the past 10 years and more than 200 field officers, administration, specialist project and support staff.

Rangers and field officers are the men and women who do the hard lifting in our parks and reserves. They carry out fire-fighting, whale rescuing, walking track maintenance, weed control programs - to name just a few of their tasks. Loss of the expert knowledge of graduate rangers and specialists is tragic. These are the people who plan and implement the strategies that conserve representative ecosystems and the habitat of rapidly diminishing native Australian species.

There is even a move in NSW to classify all national parks staff as clerks, lower entry level qualifications and put in place hard progression barriers. Rangers and specialist jobs will no longer specify a degree as an essential job requirement. Of course, graduates could still apply for these jobs, but the career opportunities offered to them will be severely limited due to the hard promotional barriers.

But what has all this got to do with science? Two major impact pressures on threatened species in national parks and reserves are fire management and pest control.

Taking fire management as the example, the media and the public tend to regard the rural fire services as the ‘heroes’ which they definitely are. The problem is fire research and fire mitigation management is at least as important as fire-fighting, but it isn’t as sexy as lots of big red trucks. What is important to remember is that national parks and reserves have been created to conserve representative ecosystems, and fire regimes are biodiversity ‘drivers’ within most of our natural ecosystems. The importance of fire can be best illustrated by the fact that the absence of certain fire frequencies and intensities may be just as detrimental to biodiversity as a regime of fires that are too frequent or too intense.

Fire management, including fire mitigation must be based on good science, not political imperatives. Fire management must also encompass a complete appreciation of the other threatening processes and activities that mitigate against species survival such as habitat loss, soil erosion, water quality and carbon sequestration. That is why national park services throughout the country need a qualified, well-resourced and equipped ranger force to undertake assessment, management and implementation of fire management, soil conservation, weed management, visitor facilities, and development. It requires a holistic view, not simply a view of hazard reduction and asset protection.

We can't expect our parks and reserves to remain in a heathy state if jobs and knowledgeable people keep disappearing.

I believe the rot starts at the top. Increasingly we have ministers for the environment who wouldn’t know a wombat from a woylie. Maybe that’s not important but the same ministers don’t seem to have any regard for the moral responsibility they have as guardians of the natural national estate.

In the recent NSW by-election for the seat of Murray, the Nationals candidate was elected. His primary policy was to log Murray Valley National Park, and if that failed, instigate a land-tenure swap. There simply aren't many areas of river red gum forest left, so a tenure swap is a ridiculous suggestion. If that's not bad enough, the NSW timber industry and their lobbyists are running a campaign, Beyond Tenure, which is a thinly disguised attempt to allow logging in our national parks.

I believe that all of us, citizen scientists, conservation bodies, academics, concerned land holders - need to keep reminding politicians that we value our national parks and reserves. Our national parks and reserves are the genetic gene banks of our precious Australian flora and fauna and we shouldn’t lose them by political ignorance and neglect.

In the early days of settlement in NSW development decision-making took little heed of its impact on the environment, the loss of flora and fauna and associated ecological communities.

In the 1970s, as human impact on our natural environment became more pervasive, a greater understanding developed of what was being lost and appreciation grew of our unique flora and fauna. Changes in attitudes led to the passing of legislation such as the Threatened Species Act, planning laws that include assessment of environmental impacts and the creation of the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS).

The NPWS was established in 1967, 50 years ago, when the Fauna Protection Panel that was constituted under the Fauna Protection Act 1948 amalgamated with the Parks and Reserves Branch of the Department of Lands. The purpose of the act was to provide for the protection and preservation of fauna, while permitting the destruction and control of those species which were harmful to primary producers. The act applied to all fauna whether native or introduced.

The national park estate has been steadily increased over the years so that now 872 reserves and parks are under NPWS management. However the declaration of new national park areas has been reduced to a trickle in recent years. The area of the state represented is now about 9% of the total land area.

NSW has fallen well behind in achieving its international commitments to biodiversity protection. As a signatory to the International Convention on Biological Diversity, NSW has voluntarily committed to protect, by 2020, at least 17% of terrestrial and inland water, and 10% of coastal and marine areas. There is a lot of catching up to do.

It is hard to see these international commitments being met when the current government attitude is to treat the NPWS as a poor relation. There has been a steady reduction in funding since the Liberal National government came into power in 2011.

Staff numbers have been cut through regular redundancy programs so that vital long-term experience has been lost in areas like remote area bushfire fighting and vegetation restoration.

Staff have been subject to repeated structuring, the latest being a reduction in the number of regional managers from 14 to 8. Regional managers will now have impossibly large areas to manage.

Funding has been diverted to eye catching new projects rather than repairing degraded facilities and heritage sites.

In a frank internal memo in June last year, then deputy chief executive Michael Wright acknowledged that NPWS staff were facing:

… ongoing budgetary pressures associated with increasing costs and salaries, and decreasing expense allocations across future years … We need to be proactive in identifying and implementing opportunities for savings to be made and revenue to be increased, to ensure we can continue to implement our core conservation, emergency response and visitor services for the people of NSW.

The savings are being imposed despite the NSW being in a bumper financial position following asset sales and booming stamp duty income. And yet the Office of Environment and Heritage website describes national parks as a ‘bedrock of nature tourism’.

No wonder the government is making the 50 years anniversary a low key event! The situation is an embarrassment to a state with such magnificent natural areas that are a major drawcard for local and international visitors. The newspapers have been full of complaints about the deteriorating visitor facilities. The money is being spent on high profile development such as the mountain bike tracks in Garigal National Park and sports stadiums.

The current executive of the Office of Environment and Heritage has refused a proposal to update a 2006, 40th anniversary document, made available through a freedom of information request, to mark the 50th anniversary. The document, NSW NPWS Commemorative History 1967–2007 was withheld, effectively suppressed, by the then Department of Environment and Climate Change executives when the authors refused to make requested changes. It has remained in draft form under copyright ever since.

The treatment of national parks is consistent with other Baird/Berejiklian government decisions to reduce land clearing restrictions and threatened species protection and facilitate development with reduced standards for biodiversity offsetting. It seems care for the environment is not consistent with the politicians’ mantra of growth at any cost.

Royal National Park Threat

The latest insult is the suggestion by the powerful Roads and Maritime that 60 hectares of the Royal be acquired for an extension to the F6 freeway from Loftus to Waterfall.

The Royal is Australia’s first national park that was reserved for protection. It was formally proclaimed on 26 April 1879.

To make matters worse there has been a push to have the Royal National Park inscribed on the World Heritage list. This process has widespread support from conservationists and the local communities. In July a technical obstacle to including the Royal on the World Heritage List was removed by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee when they added a listing criterion of ‘an area of importance in world protected area history’ (Mosley 2012). If the land excision for the F6 goes ahead there would be little chance that the listing could be accepted.

Mosley, JG (2012) The First National Park: A Natural for World Heritage, Sutherland Shire Environment Centre