The Great Koala National Park connects 175,000 hectares of state forest into a 315,000-hectare reserve on the New South Wales Coffs Coast.
The Great Koala National Park was proposed to save a species on the brink of extinction. Koalas were declared endangered in New South Wales in 2022, with a parliamentary inquiry warning they could vanish from the state entirely before 2050. The park is projected to protect an estimated 12,000 koalas, 36,000 greater gliders, and more than 150 other threatened species, as well as ancient Gondwana rainforest remnants and rare spider orchids.
The reserve merges 175,000 hectares of state forest with existing protected areas, creating a 315,000-hectare landscape comparable in scale to the Blue Mountains or Kosciuszko National Park. Aboriginal rangers will be employed throughout the park to protect cultural heritage. Environment Minister Penny Sharpe has framed the park as an economic engine too, with tourism officials hoping international visitors will eventually rank it alongside Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef, backed by an additional AUD $60 million for trails, campgrounds, and adventure infrastructure.
The Great Koala National Park’s origins trace back to 2010, when ecologists alarmed by declining koala populations commissioned a survey that eventually shaped the proposal championed by former national parks officer Ashley Love. The current Labor government committed to the park as part of its 2023 election promise. That’s where the story turns uncomfortable.
The 315,000-hectare reserve merges state forests with existing protected areas, connecting remnants of ancient Gondwana rainforest along the Coffs Coast. Photo courtesy of The Great Koala National Park.
Between the 2023 election and the boundaries being finalized, conservation groups documented approximately 15,000 hectares of the proposed park logged, roaded, or degraded, according to reporting compiled by Wilderness Australia and the National Parks Association of NSW. Global Conservation footage showed state government contractors cutting down koala-feed trees inside the very boundaries the government had pledged to protect. The government banned logging in 106 designated “koala hubs” covering roughly 12,000 hectares, but that left more than 90 percent of the proposed park legally open to continued harvesting while the boundaries were still being negotiated.
With the declaration of the Great Koala National Park, Wilderness Australia confirmed that all logging within its boundaries has now ended. The government committed the entire 176,000-hectare assessment area, rather than the roughly one-fifth some in the logging industry had lobbied for, a genuine win against sustained industry pressure to shrink the park’s footprint.
But it does not undo what was already cut. Environmental groups estimate degradation continued at a pace that, by some projections, could have pushed logged habitat from 7,185 hectares in late 2024 toward as much as 12,578 hectares, equivalent to more than 6,700 Sydney Cricket Grounds, in just months, had the pattern continued unchecked. Old-growth habitat and koala-feed trees, once removed, don’t regenerate on any timeline useful to a species some scientists warn could disappear from the state within 25 years.
Financing carries its own uncertainty. The park’s establishment is tied to the registration of a carbon credit scheme, allowing New South Wales to sell Australian Carbon Credit Units generated by the protected forest. Critics argue those credits may fail “additionality” tests, since the forest would arguably have been protected regardless once the park was declared, raising questions about whether the carbon revenue underwriting park management represents genuine emissions reduction or an accounting maneuver.
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The economic case for having logged this land at all was always shaky. Native forest logging in New South Wales has incurred annual losses of AUD $10 to 20 million, subsidized by taxpayers, while the majority of the state’s timber already comes from plantations rather than native forest. A University of Newcastle analysis projected the park could generate 9,800 regional jobs and AUD $330 million in wages over 15 years through tourism, dwarfing what logging in the same forests ever sustained.
The Great Koala National Park now stands as what conservation groups call the most significant forest protection outcome in New South Wales in 25 years. Whether it arrives in time depends on how much irreversible habitat loss occurred during the years the government spent finalizing boundaries it had already promised to protect, and whether the species can recover in what remains.
