LAND CLEARING

THE Queensland Government has introduced land-clearing laws to parliament aimed at stopping escalating deforestation.

But these laws need to be stronger. The WWF now ranks Australia, alongside Borneo and the Congo Basin, as one of the world’s worst areas for deforestation.

Queensland has been responsible for over half of the land clearing in Australia since the 1970s.

Between 2015 and 2016 Queensland has seen the disappearance of 395,000 hectares of forest, including large tracts of ancient vegetation.

Queensland is destroying trees twice as fast as Brazil. Every second a native animal is dying from the bulldozers.

Land clearing exacerbates global warming and drought. And now in the middle of April we are experiencing the effects of global warming. Temperatures are way above average: 30 degrees in Toowoomba and 35 in western Sydney.

There are bush fires near Sydney, and the cyclone season extended into April.

MARY PETR, Toowoomba