Lake Pedder from Mt Eliza, Southwest National Park, Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. Image: JJ Harrison
Advertisement
On the other side, you have the Australian government, which is making the unprecedented case for de-listing a World Heritage site. The Tasmanian Wilderness is one of the last expanses of temperate rainforest left in the world, but the government has requested that 117 patches of “disturbed and previously logged forest” be removed from the protected World Heritage status and be opened to logging.Framing the request as a "minor boundary modification," the Australian government has stated that "this will reduce the property area by 4.7 per cent and result in the removal of a number of pine and exotic eucalypt plantations as well as areas that have been logged."The International Union for Conservation of Nature has called out the government's claims. As reported by The Guardian, the IUCN's report “criticised the government's proposal for providing 'relatively scant information' to support its case and said the way the boundaries had been drawn for the proposed excision appeared 'somewhat arbitrary.'”"A Senate inquiry published last week concluded that less than 5 percent of the 74,000ha had ever been disturbed, and degraded areas did not justifying the delisting in any case," said the IUCN.As the world's largest conservation organization, the IUCN's report will likely have a big impact on the committee's decision. Plus, regardless of what you think warrants UNESCO World Heritage status, protecting a rare ecosystem from economic encroachment is sort of the point of the program.The UNESCO list is already 981 sites long, and will likely crest 1,000 this year. Given that the rising ocean is probably going to claim hundreds of them in the future, we should enjoy the peak while we're there.