Land clearing in Australia: How does your state (or territory) compare?
ABC Science / By environment reporter Nick Kilvert
Posted ThuThursday 8 OctOctober 2020 at 2:12am, updated 4hhours ago

Agriculture is the biggest driver of land clearing in Australia.(ABC News)
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Australia is a world leader in chopping down trees and wiping out animals: two questionable accomplishments that are tightly connected.

Land clearing and habitat loss are the biggest drivers of animal extinction and in recent years, Australia's aggressive rate of land clearing has ranked among the developed world's fastest.

So despite our reputation for untamed wilderness and charismatic wildlife, it's perhaps no surprise that Australia has one of the highest rates of animal extinction in the world.

We've driven 29 mammals to extinction since European colonisation and more than 1,700 others are threatened or endangered. The once abundant koala is rapidly vanishing from New South Wales and Queensland.

But how much land are we clearing? Getting a fix on this figure is tough. The only nationally consistent data comes from the Federal Government's National Greenhouse Accounts (NGA).

There are questions over the methodology used in that system — which we'll get to.

First, let's look at the numbers state-by-state from lowest to highest. This gives you a picture of how much land has been cleared, right across Australia, from 2010 until the most recently available data in 2018.

Because this data comes from the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) estimates of clearing (called primary conversion and reclearing) it includes both native forestry and plantation forestry figures.

However, native forest and plantation forestry only contributed to around 86,000 hectares of clearing in this period. Under commercial forestry activities, trees are regrown after harvesting.

Agriculture was the reason for most of the clearing, with "grazing native vegetation" accounting for more than 1.8 million hectares of clearing. The next biggest contributor to the data was "grazing modified pastures" at around 125,000 hectares. ...