The demise of Koala populations in NSW forests has been greatly exaggerated –with new data from Penny Sharpe’s Department of Environment and Heritage showing that more than 274,000 Koalas are living in national parks, state forests and on private land.
Wood Central can reveal that the baseline figure, established after scientists used heat-detecting drones and acoustic recorders to survey more than 1,000 sites across the state, is more than 13 times greater than numbers used to underpins the five-year Koala Strategy (20,000) established in 2021 and comes after the Threatened Species Scientific Committee, which recommended that Koalas should be added to the endangered list in NSW, the ACT, and Qld, showed that North Coast populations would decline from 8,000 in 2021 to 4,000 in 2031.
“This data supports what we’ve been saying all along – koalas are not endangered and have never been at risk of extinction by 2050,” according to Steve Dobbyns, the executive director of Forest and Wood Communities Australia, who spoke to Wood Central hours after being interviewed by ABC Radio. “Penny Sharpe was wrong when she and other ENGOs said there were fewer than 50,000 koalas left in the wild,” Dobbyns said. “Depending on who you saw quoted the numbers ranged wildly from 4,000 to 50,000.”
“The Minns Government was wrong when they declared the Great Koala National Park was essential to save the koala from extinction by 2050. The koala has been weaponised by Labor and the Greens on the back of the horrific images during the Black Summer fires purely for political expediency at the expense of the native timber industry and the regional communities it supports,” Dobbyns said.
In September, Wood Central revealed that tracts of working forest will be permanently closed under a supersized Great Koala National Park, after Chris Minns made a “captain’s call” in establishing a 176,000-hectare reserve, which, combined with existing national parks, will form a 476,000-hectare conservation area — the largest in the world dedicated to koala protection.
Now, armed with the new data, unions are pushing for the Labor government to reconsider the size and scale of the park: “This report demonstrates that there are significant koala numbers in NSW,” said Alison Rudman, the NSW Secretary of the powerful TFTU – TIMBER, FURNISHING & TEXTILES UNION. “It also tells the NSW Government that workers deserve better than the false choice between good timber jobs and thriving koala populations – we can have both.”
According to Sharpe, the survey provides policy makers with the clearest picture yet of koala distributions in NSW and will be an important tool for guiding conservation decisions: “The Minns Labor Government has a strong record on koala conservation, and this survey shows we have been making the right decisions to ensure their survival.”
The latest estimate is in line with the CSIRO’s National Koala Monitoring Program, which revealed that koala populations are between 729,000 and 918,000, more than double the population when koalas were first classified as “vulnerable” in 2012. In effect, current populations are now about twenty times greater than the number forecast by the Australian Koala Foundation – between 32,000 and 58,000 after the Black Summer bushfires, and crucially, more than double the populations estimated in 2012 (forecast to be between 144,000 and 605,000) when Koala populations were first listed as ‘vulnerable’ in New South Wales.
Learn more about the NSW Koala Baseline Survey
Wood Central understands that the new survey is the most comprehensive statewide koala survey ever undertaken. It provides a new, scientifically rigorous understanding of where koalas occur in New South Wales and how their numbers vary across the landscape.
Using cutting‑edge technology, the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water systematically surveyed koalas to model both occupancy — the likelihood of detecting a koala at a given site — and abundance, or the number of koalas per hectare. The program involved more than 6,500 kilometres of night‑time drone flights and over 400,000 hours of acoustic recording during the breeding season, covering more than 1,000 sites across national parks, state forests, Aboriginal land and private property.
In addition to the new fieldwork, the analysis incorporated data from more than 2,500 sites surveyed under previous NSW Koala Strategy programs, creating the most complete dataset ever assembled for the species in the state. The results estimate 274,000 koalas (95% confidence interval: 231,000 to 320,000), with detections at 40% of passive acoustic sites and 33% of drone survey sites.
The findings also reveal that koalas are distributed unevenly across NSW, with populations recorded on the North Coast, in Greater Sydney and in the Byadbo Wilderness, while other regions — including the Far West, the Pilliga and parts of the South Coast — showed sparse or no detections.
