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In 2016, a friend called Linda Sparrow about a 400m patch of koala trees on the western edge of Bangalow, a small regional town in northern New South Wales.
The region’s landscape had long since been logged by loggers and farmers, and precious few eucalyptus trees remained to provide refuge for koalas seeking food or shelter.
“My friend just called one day and said, ‘Linda, I need your help to save some koalas.’ And I was just like, ‘Of course you do,'” says Sparrow.
Until now, there have only been two recorded sightings of the koala in Bangalow. By the end of the enthusiastic community campaign, people were actively searching, the number of sightings jumped and the patch of trees was saved.
Then Sparrow had an idea: why not continue?
The following year she founded Bangalow Koalas and the “little balls of fluff” have taken over her life ever since. The group, supported by the World Wildlife Fund and recognized by World Economic Forum, held its first planting in 2019. With the help of private landowners who volunteered to get involved, it went on to plant more than 377,000 trees across the region. It aims to reach 500,000 by 2025.
Koalas along Australia’s east coast are increasingly threatened with extinction. In 2022, the species is officially declared endangered with the Australian government at the time providing $50 million to help reverse the decline.
The decision came as a shock to few. This was a long-awaited decision completely preventable – koalas were first listed as vulnerable in 2012 and in the 10 years since then have faced numerous ongoing threats, including the spread of chlamydia, catastrophic forest fires and habitat loss. Some of this habitat loss is due to logging, which continues in the koala habitat of northern New South Wales although the state government promises it will protect areas important to the species.
Koala corridors planted by groups such as Bangalow Koalas – whose funding runs out at the end of the year – aim to help solve some of this challenge by connecting fragmented habitats with patches of eucalyptus trees.
Due to the nature of private ownership, the group must rely on individual landowners to agree to participate and volunteer their properties. While they’ve never had a shortage of willing volunteers, the situation means the group has to work piecemeal while taking into account the specific area where they’re planting. In some areas where ancient rainforest once stood, they are planting a mixture of koala trees and rainforest. To the west, where the land opens up, the focus is on the eucalypts.
Sparrow says the benefits aren’t just limited to koalas. Walking through the dappled light at one of the earliest sites her group worked on, she says restoring a barren landscape is having a knock-on effect on wallabies, birds, lizards, insect life and even people.
“We’re not just connecting and creating a koala wildlife corridor and fragmented habitat, we’re connecting communities,” says Sparrow. “Landcare groups, local communities, schools – they come in all the time to plant.”
People have traveled from as far north as Toowoomba and Brisbane to get involved, she says, and as far south as Sydney and even Melbourne. Once, after the disastrous wildfires of Black Summer, two cabin crew from San Francisco flew in to help with the planting.
Other groups also look to Bangalow koalas as a model. When Dirk Jansen, an IT manager, moved to Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula in 2016, he kept hearing his neighbors asking “where have all the koalas gone”.
“The habitat on the Mornington Peninsula is very fragmented,” Jansen says. “They might have farmland in between, or housing, or major roads, or highways.”
With more than two-thirds of the peninsula’s koala habitat on private property, Jansen says it’s “death by a thousand cuts” as small swathes of the area have been gradually cleared over time. To deal with this, he asked Sparrow for advice on forming his own landscaping group, which held its first planting of 4,000 trees in 2020.
“We’ve been able to increase to 25,000 plants that we plant each season,” Jansen says. “From a volunteer standpoint, that’s what we strive for every year.”
Dr Edward Narayan is a Senior Lecturer in Animal Science at the University of Queensland whose research focuses on stress responses in animals, particularly wild koala populations. He says this reforestation work is important to help reduce pressure on the species.
His research and that of his PhD students found that koalas living on the outskirts of cities are most at risk of stress, with many moving into residential areas seeking safe havens – with all the risks that entails.
“Koalas are very interesting wild creatures,” he says. “You have a major stressor from their ecology like disease, but there are new stressors like dog attacks and motor vehicle collisions.
“These are immediate stressors. When you talk about stress, you’re also thinking about the state of the landscape – things like habitat loss, land clearing, and long-term things like heat stress or wildfires.”
Narayan says grassroots community groups are a “necessary first step to healing the landscape”, but it’s also essential for governments to tackle climate change “otherwise you’re only dealing with one piece of the puzzle”.
If governments don’t take the risk seriously and fail to take meaningful action to reduce CO2 emissions, he says the vital work of communities on the ground will eventually be overwhelmed. Government of New South Wales has set aside $190 million for a plan to double koala numbers by restoring 25,000 hectares of koala habitat in its first phase and the federal government maintains a fund of $76.9 million to support such work.
Programs like these are a good start, but during the Black Summer wildfires, more than 7.5 m2 hectares of eucalyptus forest burned and the Australian economy remains heavily dependent on fossil fuel production. The country ranks among the largest exporters of LNG and coal in the world and still allows the development of new coal mines and gas fields.
“You know, I have two kids,” says Narayan. “It’s about the future we leave them. Can you imagine Australia without koalas? I do not think so. It would be like not having the Opera House or the Harbor Bridge. It’s built into who we are as Australians.”
According to the World Wildlife Fund, more than 60,000 koalas were killed during the Black Summer bushfires, an example Sparrow says illustrates how this is already affecting their work – and how he hopes planting trees will inspire others to take further action.
“You know, people come to me and say they feel so hopeless. They say, “with everything going on, how can I make an impact?” Then they come here and plant a tree, they see that they’re actually doing something,” she says.
“I’m hoping that maybe then they’ll start thinking, ‘What else can I do?'”
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