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Conservationists and wildlife experts have expressed grave concern that Australian state governments are continuing to log unburned forests that are home to vulnerable koala populations.

Estimates suggest that at least 5,000 koalas were killed and over 2 million hectares of habitat was destroyed in the state of New South Wales during the 2019/20 bushfires—a devastating blow to a species that is already facing the compounding risks of climate change, urban development and deforestation.

In light of these threats, a recent government inquiry found that the state’s koalas could become extinct by 2050 unless there is urgent government intervention to prevent habitat loss.

Yet despite a number of clear recommendations from that same inquiry—that the NSW government urgently prioritise the protection of koala habitat in urban planning, for example, and that they ban the opening up of old growth forests to logging—the state-owned logging agency Forestry Corporation is continuing to cut down trees in increasingly rare koala habitats.

“It’s a scandal that the government isn’t doing what’s required to prevent the extinction of one of our most iconic species,” James Tremain, from the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, told Vice News over the phone. “They’re schizophrenic on the issue. They say they have a koala strategy and an ambition to increase the population of koalas, but they’ve introduced laws that have made it much easier to destroy koala habitat.”

The recent bushfires destroyed millions of hectares of native bushland, but the NSW government has largely maintained the intensity of its logging operations: pledging to maintain wood supply at the same rate as before the disaster. As Tremain explained, that effectively means more intense logging operations across the state as corporations try to yield the same volume of timber from a significantly reduced area of bushland.

Forestry Corporation documents released through parliamentary processes showed that 85 percent of forest previously designated for logging on NSW’s south coast was burned in the bushfires, along with about 44 percent on the north coast. In response, the Forestry Corporation increased its logging intensity to keep up with the demand for timber.

The Nature Conservation Council of NSW previously asked the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA) to investigate the logging, but was told that operations could not be halted when Forestry Corporation was not in breach of its approvals.

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