News

Newsletters, Local Issues, Publications & Submissions​

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Land for Wildlife Summer 2025-26 Newsletter

Assessments 2025 – CRG Sediment Testing – Water Quality Testing – Tucabia Flora Reserve – Events – LfWCV on iNaturalist – FrogID – Nesting Boxes – Bats In Backyards – BCT Grants – Your Land for Wildlife Membership

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Submission on “Improved” Native Forest Management (INFM) by focusing on Carbon Credits!

* CEC is highly sceptical of the Government’s reliance on ACCUs to offset emissions while approving coal mine extensions and the Narrabri CSG project and pipeline.
* There is a significant danger that this will result in more intensive logging activity on other lands to make up the shortfall, which will result in no carbon benefit at all.
* Carbon credits should only be created when an area of forest is permanently protected from logging.
* Permanent monitoring plots be established with regular surveys undertaken to ensure long term compliance is achieved.

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Land for Wildlife Winter 2025 Newsletter

• Land for Wildlife Assessments 2024-25
• Water Quality Testing starts in Lower Clarence • Protecting The Clarence from Mineral Mining • BCT Grants • Conservation Connections delayed • Land for Wildlife Membership

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CCA EDO Roadshow

“Over the past two years, more landholders have come to us about access letters, licence breaches, and mining companies misusing or blocking access to private land,” said the CCA. “As volunteers, we can’t provide legal advice but this Roadshow, made possible with the EDO and local groups, is something we’ve long hoped to deliver. It’s timely, necessary, and community driven.”

“We are forced to co-exist for the next 21 years under a lease granted without our consent, with no viable resource and no meaningful protection. If I locked them out of my land, I’d face $200,000 in fines — but they can lock me out, and it’s called legal.” – Resident – Tabulam

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Submission: NPWS consultation paper on camping fees

Our recommendations are:
* better definition of all terms used (e.g. ghost camping) particularly in relation to key policy settings (e.g. high and low seasons)
* more context to the proposed policy changes, with data on national park visitation clearly linked to camping use specific to each of the State’s regions, so it is directly relevant to the topic of the consultation paper and the locality of each campground
* a guarantee that camping fees are directly used to benefit the environment of the local parks and increase the presence of NPWS staff in those parks
* removal of additional day use fees for campers
* ceasing the practice of contracting campground management in national parks to private companies more used to managing hotels or caravan parks, with management returned to NPWS control
* stopping the use of market-based competitive neutrality to set camping fees in national parks

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Land for Wildlife Summer 2024/25 Newsletter

• Land for Wildlife Assessments in 2024
• Tree Planting workshop with Pete Turland
• Maclean Nursery Mural Unveiled
• Friends of Koala
• Tree Tro ® Project
• Cane Toads on the Move
• BCT Grants
• Your Land for Wildlife Membership

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The water quality crisis, 2023 update

Despite constant reports that the turbidity levels in the Nymboida River after rain are too high to allow extraction to occur, we’ve never heard a complaint from either council about forestry practices, including their being leased for grazing. Even the announcement by Forests NSW in 2015, that they intended to undertake intensive logging of some forests, i.e., clear-felling, there was no complaint. Then again total silence in 2019 when the State Government changed the Integrated Forests Operations Approval, halving the width of buffer zones along all mapped gullies and creeks, allowing logging to occur to within 5m of smaller waterways.

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Submission to the Review of the Water Sharing Plan for the Clarence River

Fundamentally, we believe there has been an overallocation of licensed extraction in the Orara River which occurred without due consideration of the harvestable rights of all properties along that river for domestic and stock purposes. The Clarence WSP appears to be trying to mask the problems that water extraction poses for that river by including it in a broad, catchment-wide water sharing plan.
The CEC believes that the Clarence WSP is also flawed by the lack of lack of fine detail in defining the extraction management units, which has allowed the dealing (or trading) in water access licences between disparate sub-catchments and micro-catchments.

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Submission to the Forestry Industry Action Plan

The CEC has long been a vocal critic of Forestry Corporation of NSW (FCNSW), and its previous manifestations as a state government agency known as Forests NSW, State Forests of NSW and the Forestry Commission of NSW. This corporation, irrespective of its name and corporate branding, continues to blatantly conduct an unacceptable and unsustainable assault on the publicly owned native forest estate. This assault has continued for more than half a century since the widespread adoption of
industrial logging practices.

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