Forestry Corporation of NSW has ‘a pattern’ of illegally damaging the environment, scathing judgment finds | New South Wales

A court has released a scathing judgment against the New South Wales’ state-owned forest agency, finding it had “a pattern” of illegally damaging the environment and had refused to accept the “true extent of the harm that it has caused”.

The Land and Environment Court fined the Forestry Corporation of NSW (FCNSW) $360,000 for offences related to the logging of 53 eucalyptus trees in environmentally significant forest near Eden, in the state’s south, after the black summer bushfires.

FCNSW had pleaded guilty after it failed to accurately map the areas in Yambulla state forest in 2020. It logged one of the areas, breaching conditions imposed by the Environment Protection Authority to help bushland recover after the catastrophic 2019-20 fires.

The court accepted an EPA submission that the agency had “a pattern of environmental offending, has not provided any compelling evidence of measures taken by it to prevent its reoffending, and does not accept the true extent of harm that it has caused by its offending”.

Justice Rachel Pepper agreed that any penalty imposed on the Forestry Corporation “must serve to deter it from future criminality”.

The unlawful logging and harvesting caused actual harm to the 53 trees that were felled and affected refuges for native species after the bushfire disaster. The harvesting also caused potential harm to three threatened bird species.

The court found an affidavit filed by the FCNSW chief executive, Anshul Chaudhary, “constitutes no more than a bare expression of contrition and remorse” and that the forestry corporation had not taken steps to remediate the harm it had caused.

It rejected the agency’s submission that little weight should be given to past offences because they were not similar to the mapping and harvesting offences at Yambulla.

“FCNSW’s submission must be rejected. It has a significant history of unlawfully carrying out forestry operations, which is exactly what the mapping and harvesting offences are,” the decision states.

The court found it was likely the agency would reoffend in similar circumstances.

The EPA’s executive director of operations, Jason Gordon, said the breaches were totally unacceptable and welcomed the court’s decision.

“The special conditions were introduced to protect parts of the forest that weren’t as damaged by fire, giving wildlife and biodiversity an opportunity to recover,” he said.

“FCNSW contractors cut down a total of 53 eucalypt trees in an unburned environmentally significant area that was home to important shelters and food resources for local wildlife or native plants.”

FCNSW acknowledged the court’s decision.

Chaudhary said the breaches were “due to human error applying a one-off condition, and we deeply regret the mistake and the environmental damage it has caused”.

“To make amends, we immediately protected an alternative area of forest, and the harvested area is regenerating,” he said.

“We have since implemented measures to ensure such errors do not happen again. In our standard operations, mapping of environmentally sensitive areas into operational maps is an automated process, which eliminates the risk of human error.”

Chaudhary said the agency took its environmental responsibility seriously, had invested significantly in resources and technology since 2020 and was committed to improving its environmental compliance.

The NSW Greens environment spokesperson, Sue Higginson, said the findings were a “damning indictment of Forestry Corporation’s integrity and demonstrates why we are calling for them to be barred from logging our public native forests”.

“The government is ultimately responsible for the Forestry Corporation, and have a duty to protect the people and environment of NSW from this rogue state-owned corporation,” she said.