A plans to set up a national park for koalas in Australia is threatening to backfire as loggers rush to profit while they still can.
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00:00 A koala finds a comfortable perch in a eucalyptus tree.
00:06 It's a deeply Australian scene, but one that's increasingly rare.
00:11 Here in the state of New South Wales, koalas have been declared endangered.
00:15 Some estimates say they could disappear from the wild by 2050.
00:19 And this isn't the only part of Australia where they're in trouble.
00:22 500 kilometers north of Sydney, plans are underway to take action.
00:27 Another 3,000 square kilometers of public forest and national park land are set to merge
00:32 into a new national park, Great Koala National Park.
00:36 But that won't happen until 2025 at the earliest.
00:40 And in the meantime, the rush is on to profit before logging is banned.
00:44 There's been a massive expansion and intensification of logging in some of the most biodiverse
00:51 areas of the Great Koala National Park.
00:53 There is an intent behind that to grab the resources whilst they still can.
01:00 The state government has responded.
01:03 It says it stopped logging in over 100 koala hotspots on state land in September alone.
01:09 But these cover just under 5% of the proposed national park.
01:13 And officials say that while they want to move quickly, rushing the national park is
01:16 out of the question.
01:18 The real issue here is how can we do it as quickly as possible?
01:21 How can we work with people?
01:23 We weren't just going to press a stop altogether straight away and without any plan for what
01:28 happens with those communities and without a proper assessment of the forests.
01:37 And so logging continues.
01:39 The timber industry argues this isn't a bad thing.
01:43 Industry leaders say they employ 9,000 people in New South Wales and operate to high environmental
01:48 standards.
01:49 They say it's possible to have both logging and sustainable forests and that a ban would
01:54 just lead people to buy wood from less strictly governed parts of the world.
01:59 If we were to lose our native forestry industry in New South Wales, we're really just pushing
02:04 the supply of that timber overseas to other jurisdictions where they have much weaker
02:09 environmental standards.
02:10 Where we're seeing a lot more rapid degradation of those environments and a greater impact
02:16 on threatened species in other jurisdictions.
02:20 But environmentalists sharply disagree.
02:23 They want a total ban and more.
02:26 My greatest aspiration is that all the forests across the Great Koala National Park are immediately
02:32 protected from logging.
02:34 What ends up happening will be critical.
02:36 The proposed park is home to 15% of New South Wales' declining koala population.
02:42 And logging is set to ramp up even further.
02:45 If the park isn't created fast enough, it could spell trouble for these iconic animals.
02:50 John Su and John van Triest for Taiwan Plus.
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