Sat 22 Nov 2025 00.00
Photo: AAP Image/Lukas Coch
Minister Watt asks Australians to believe we can better protect nature by facilitating faster exploitation with less regulation and less scrutiny – taking the framework recommended by Graeme Samuel and watering down almost every key element and bringing in Ministerial discretion where independence was recommended.
When one of the then Coalition Governments’ key advisors on the development of the current Act, Atticus Fleming AM, combines with Professor of Environmnetal Law and advisor to the Samuel Review, Professor Andrew Macintosh, to conclude that the reforms:
Australians can be confident the so called reforms are spin designed to green light mining, logging and other forms of industrial development.
There is no recognition that the crisis created by biodiversity loss – which is still predominantly driven by loss, damage, fragmenation and pollution of natural ecosystems – damages the ecosystem services on which humanity depends for survival. Worse the legislation completely fails to recognise how the biodiversity crisis and climate crisis amplify each other, that neither crisis can be solved unless they are solved together and that if we fail on one we will fail on both.
The woeful failure to tighten the regulation of land clearing and native forest logging suggests either profound ecological ignorance or complete indifference, to the fate of wildlife and our natural and cultural heritage. More basically, it ignores the fact that biodiversity and ecosystem integrity underpin the livelihoods of every Australian, help stabilise our climate and provide clean fresh water for the majority of our population.
Nothing illustrates the entwined problems of biodiversity loss and climate change better than the need to prevent further loss and degradation of Australia’s forests and woodlands and foster their ecological recovery.
Time and again Australia supports multi-lateral decisions to end deforestation and forest degradation. The latest being at UNFCCC COP 28 where we agreed to protect and restore nature, end deforestataion and forest degradation and align climate action with the goals and targets of the Kumnming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, all by 2030.
The role of Nature in mitigating climate change and the dangers for achieving climate goals if we continue to damage and destroy natural ecosystems is a matter of National Environmental Significance. Why? Because ecosystems store vast amounts of carbon which if released to the atmosphere, remove any hope of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees. Start unravelling the web of life (biodiversity), destabilising ecosystems and risking all the ecosystem services on which we rely.
The most important ecosystem service provided by forests for climate mitigation is storing carbon for long periods of time. Globally, there is more carbon stored in forests than in known reserves of oil and gas. Minimising risks to forest carbon stocks means doing several things simultaneously: limiting warming to 1.5 degrees by urgently reducing gross emissions from all sources, including from deforestation (clearing) and forest degradation (logging); improving the conservation management of all native forests; and protecting and restoring biodiversity and ecological connectivity to retain and recover forest ecosystem integrity and stability to minimise the risk of ecosystem carbon loss.
Australia is home to some of the most carbon dense forests on Earth. If previously logged native forests were left to recover their natural carbon stocks they could draw down and store roughly 50% more carbon than they do now. Recent peer reviewed science indicates Matt Kean was right to include native forest protection and recovery in his pathway to 2035 emissions reduction goals.
Biodiversity in all its complexity is the system driver on which food production, water quality, climate regulation, clean air and carbon sequestration and storage and many other ecosystem services we take for granted, rely .
Virginia Young is Nature Thematic Lead IUCN Climate Crisis Commission; Climate Specialist Group IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas.
Note: The views expressed are personal and not neccessarily those of IUCN
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