Why is land clearing bad

This habitat loss and fragmentation is especially concerning for native animals such as koalas, which in Queensland have been recently added to the threatened species list. Land clearing also leads to excess runoff, which has serious negative impacts for the Great Barrier Reef, marine ecosystems, and marine industries such as fisheries and tourism. Making it easier to clear vegetation flies in the face of the Reef Rescue program. This is a program set up by the Federal government to address declining water quality due to sediment, nutrient and pesticide runoff from agricultural land.

Governments need to justify their decisions economically. In this case, there has been no mention by the State government of the short and long-term environmental costs to all of the ecosystem services provided by vegetation: water quality, soil salinity, and soil fertility. The Queensland government has taken a short-term view of how to increase productivity rather than looking at the long-term impacts this will have on the lands farmers rely on.

Victoria will also make changes to their land clearing laws. Victorian farmers will be able to buy offsets for the land clearing. Learning from the past to adapt for the future should be a central part of land management. Yet the changes in land clearing laws in Queensland and Victoria show a disregard for the large body of work and research that has been done on native vegetation clearing and the impacts this has on the land and ecosystems.

The result is the area starts experiencing desert conditions. This percentage steadily grows as years go by, and in the future, it might be extreme if we do not act now. Apart from holding the soil together, the roots keep groundwater levels balanced.

Clearing and removing these roots makes the water levels rise, increasing the salt content in the soil. It is hard for plants to grow in this soil, and if you consider doing farming on the land, your production will be minimal.

Changes in groundwater levels have a direct effect on other water sources. After land gets exposed and erosion occurs the sediments and nutrients runoff into rivers. High nutrient levels in waterways result in the occurrence and outbreak of toxic algae. If the river deposits its water in a lake invaded by water hyacinth, the weeds will increase.

The rivers can also deposit eroded sediments on coasts damaging coral reefs. Visit the rest of the site for more useful and informative articles!

Skip to content. Table of Contents. Like this: Like Loading Modern Kitchens Trends: Edition. Leave a Reply Cancel reply. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. If we convert Tasmania's 66, cleared hectares to a 1-kilometre-wide strip of land, it would be kilometres long or the distance from Melbourne to Canberra. While Tasmania's area of land clearing is more than double the Northern Territory's, the total land area of Tasmania is only one-twentieth the size.

Although native forest logging has been responsible for clearing a small area by comparison, it has been a flashpoint in Tasmania for decades. From a relative high point of 14, hectares cleared in a year back in , only 5, hectares were cleared in , according to NGA data.

But the Liberal state government came to power in on a promise to revive the Tasmanian forestry industry, and soon after their election, reclassified around , hectares of forest designated as "future reserve land" to "future potential production forest". The moratorium on logging of around , hectares of that forest lifted in April of this year, and there are fears that the forestry wars of old could kick off again.

If we go back to our 1-kilometre-wide strip of land, South Australia's total clearing stretches almost 1,km from Newcastle to Melbourne. More than 90 per cent of that land was classified as reclearing, meaning it had been cleared at least once in the previous 30 years.

A total of , hectares were cleared in Victoria, with 16, of that classified as forest over 30 years old. This time our 1-kilometre-wide piece of land would stretch from Hobart to the southern suburbs or Brisbane. Like Tasmania, native forest logging in Victoria has been responsible for clearing a relatively small area compared to agriculture. Also like Tasmania, native forest logging in Tasmania has been a hotly contested issue. Logging is considered a threat to species such as the critically endangered Leadbeater's possum and vulnerable greater glider.

In , Premier Dan Andrews committed to ending native forest logging in the state by , and in the wake of last season's devastating bushfires there have been calls to bring that end forward. But in April this year, the Victorian Environment Department updated and extended five regional forest agreements RFAs covering native forest logging in different parts of the state. These RFAs include their own environmental protections and because of this timber harvesting operations done in accordance with these agreements "are not subject to certain Commonwealth legislative requirements", according to the Victorian Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning DELWP.

But critics say RFAs allow logging operations to bypass federal environment laws and often result in the habitat of threatened species being cleared without any environmental impact assessment. In May of this year, a federal court ruled that VicForests had breached environmental laws by logging the habitat of threatened species.

Of the , hectares cleared in Western Australia, 68, hectares were primary forests at least 30 years old. In total that roughly equals a 1-kilometre-wide piece of land 2, kilometres long or from Darwin to Adelaide with change.

The lion's share of land cleared in Western Australia was for agriculture, horticulture and forestry. As well as land clearing, Western Australia's forests are under threat from climate change. The southwest of Western Australia has been experiencing a long-term climate shift since the s, which researchers have attributed to historical deforestation resulting in decreased rainfall. Combined with hotter summer extremes this has resulted in the collapse of some species including around 16, hectares of northern jarrah forest.

That makes our 1-kilometre wide strip of cleared land almost 7, kilometres long, roughly stretching from Perth to Cairns via Brisbane. In , New South Wales relaxed its native vegetation clearing laws, however the impact that has had on land clearing is expected to show up in the reporting periods for and A leaked report from the Natural Resources Commission last year suggested that land clearing may have surged by as much as 13 times.

Our 1km wide strip of cleared land would stretch for a whopping 24, kilometres — roughly all the way around Australia twice minus Tassie. The vast majority of clearing in Queensland is for agriculture — over 90 per cent of cleared forest was replaced by pasture in the years In contrast to New South Wales, Queensland's land clearing laws were tightened in and it's expected that clearing figures will drop significantly in the coming reporting periods.

Despite the clearing of more than 3. To get to that conclusion, they have compared the amount of cleared land 3. Again, the lion's share of that regrowth — 2.