![]() ![]() Reports state that conservationist Kailas Wild has teamed up with Nature NSW to highlight how logging companies have started targeting areas that survived the summer bushfires. After the fires that ravaged acres of land,Īustralian state governments are continuing to log unburned forests that areĪlso Read: After Being Taken Care Of For Months, Koalas Rescued From Bushfires To Be Released In The Wild Now there’s a new concern that has cropped up among Climate That mine is slated to produce 1.9m tonnes a year.Australia's wildfires destroyed more than a fifth of theĬountry's forests making the blazes "globally unprecedented"įollowing a years-long drought linked to climate change.Īccording to a study in the Nature Climate Change journal,īetween September 2019 and January 2020, around 5.8 million hectares of the broadleaf forest was burned in New South Wales and Victoria. Last December the department allowed another proposed mining project, Gemini, to be exempt from providing an EIS. How can anything survive if you knock its habitat down?” The Australian Koala Foundation’s chair, Deborah Tabart, said environmental offsets were ineffective. They also said “post-mining rehabilitation targets include the re-establishment of koala habitat” and that koalas had “been known to recolonise rehabilitated land in as little as six years” – though acknowledging it would probably take longer in this case. ![]() The spokesperson said Vulcan and Vulcan South were “separate, small scale, short term mines” located 10 kilometres apart, and that production rates were “reflective of the mining strategy, equipment used and business model being employed”. “The adjoining koala habitat of the Cherwell-Harrow Range extends for 170,000ha.” “Koalas exist sparsely in the Bowen Basin and as such, the proposed project activities are expected to effect a small number of individuals,” a spokesperson for the company said. Those documents showed the company would clear 1,023.6ha of koala habitat. Vitrinite said ecological assessments it submitted to the Queensland Department of Environment to support the Vulcan South application last month were “prepared to an EIS technical standard”. Habitat destruction and clearing were named as major causes of extinction, along with introduced species. The latest state of the environment report, released on Tuesday, found Australia has lost more mammal species than any other continent, and has one of the highest rates of species decline in the developed world. “It’s like the difference between losing a leg and losing two legs.” “We need to consider cumulative impacts,” he said. Lindenmayer said a piecemeal approach to environmental approval, in which projects were assessed in isolation, amounted to a system that threatened to make Australia the “extinction capital of the planet”. “What’s the point of uplisting a species to endangered if you’re then going to just allow more and more habitat for that species to be cleared?” he said. Prof David Lindenmayer, an Australian National University ecologist, said allowing the habitat of endangered species to be destroyed “made a mockery” of environmental protections. The company said it would “conservatively offset the affected habitat” from the Vulcan South site in a “managed offset area specifically focused on koala habitat conservation”, and that the project would have limited long-term impacts on koala populations That mine is clearing more than 200ha of koala habitat and was approved by former Coalition federal government in March. Vitrinite already has approval for an adjacent mine, Vulcan, that will also produce 1.95m tonnes a year. ![]() Vitrinite’s proposed Vulcan South project is the latest in what environmental campaigners describe as a “disturbing trend” of coalmines being proposed that fall fractionally below the thresholds that trigger the EIS process.Īt Vulcan South, Vitrinite proposes to produce 1.95m tonnes of coal every year, below the 2m tonne threshold that would require the company to prepare an EIS.
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