‘Not good enough’: Why land clearing remains a problem in NSW

Land clearing across NSW jumped 16 per cent in 2024, the first full year after the Minns government came to power promising to rein in excessive clearing.In the Statewide Landcover and Tree Study released on Tuesday, the clearing of trees or “native woody vegetation” was down, while the clearing of grasses and scrub or “non-woody vegetation” was up.Ken Henry, chair of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, said it was “inexplicable” that the rate of land clearing was going up.Australian Conservation FoundationKen Henry, chair of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, who led the Minns government’s review of the Biodiversity Conservation Act, said it was “inexplicable” that the rate of land clearing was going up.“The government has said, and I think they’re genuine, that they really are determined to stop excessive land clearing,” Henry said. “They’re determined to do it, but they haven’t done it. It’s just not good enough. There’s something broken in the system.”Trees were cleared from 24,103 hectares of land, the figures show. While this is 19 per cent below the 2018-2024 average, it is still much higher than before 2016 when the former Coalition government loosened laws to give private landowners more leeway to clear land. The Minns government promised to overhaul these laws but is yet to do so.Another 57,190 hectares had non-woody vegetation cleared, which the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water says includes native and non-native vegetation. This was 13 per cent more than the 2018 -2024 average of 50,700 hectares.Agriculture is the biggest cause of deforestation, counting for 71,220 hectares of the woody and non-woody clearing. This was up from an average of 66,800 hectares from 2018 to 2024.Clearing for infrastructure was 7268 hectares in 2024, while native forestry across both state forests and private land accounted for 2805 hectares. Both were down on the 2018-2024 average.Unallocated land clearing remains significantly high and in 2024 accounted for 60 per cent of all clearing. Henry said this needed to be fixed.NSW Farmers president Xavier Martin said nothing in the report indicated an increase or “excessive land clearing”.Martin said the high “unallocated” amount referred to in the report was mostly landowners legally dealing with groundcover where exotic weeds outnumbered the native vegetation.“It is not illegal to treat this land, but the inability of the environmental regulator to be able to remotely differentiate between the various species sees it termed ‘unallocated’,” Martin said. “We have long called on government to get mapping right.”The SLATS report says most authorised clearing under the Local Land Services Act was for “invasive native species” management, accounting for 45 per cent of authorisations. This category refers to native woody plants that either regenerate thickly following disturbance or encroach on vegetation communities where they previously did not occur. However, this category is disputed by many ecologists who say that dense thickets of native scrub have high biodiversity value, and are part of a natural pattern of reforestation.In a 2019 report, the NSW Auditor-General was scathing that there was no requirement to demonstrate that a plant was actually invading a landscape before approving its clearing as an invasive native species. The NSW Natural Resources Commission has delivered a report on how to protect biodiversity in rural areas, which is understood to include expert advice on invasive native species, but the government says this remains a confidential Cabinet document while it decides its response.Nature Conservation Council chief executive Jacqui Mumford said so-called invasive native species provided habitat for threatened species in NSW.“To have this sort of carve-out where people can clear vegetation, native vegetation, under the name of invasive native species is having a huge impact on the landscape and on our wildlife, and absolutely needs to be removed,” Mumford said.Martin from NSW Farmers said removing invasive native species was not clearing for a change of use but appropriate management, without which “native vegetation [would be] choked by invasive species”.“This management by farmers, caring for their land, delivers an environmental and production benefit and farmers should be rewarded for looking after the landscape like this,” Martin said.Australian Conservation Foundation has 1625 citizen scientists scanning satellite imagery to detect suspected illegal clearing and report it to the authorities.Nathaniel Pelle, ACF’s business and nature lead, said the organisation believed its reporting had helped stop high-risk bulldozing in a number of locations, including a large area of cockatoo habitat in Western NSW.“If Chris Minns continues to sit on his hands, and the supermarkets and fast food giants that promised deforestation free beef continue to turn a blind eye to the bulldozers, then we don’t need a crystal ball to predict the data will tell a similar story next year,” Pelle said. “The NSW public and our native species deserve better than that.”Get to the heart of what’s happening with climate change and the environment. 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