What qualifies as a win in environmental campaigning?
Is it when a huge forest area that is home to a stack of threatened species, including koalas, and has been the focus of years and years of campaigning, is protected from logging?
Or does it depend on how the battle is won – for example, if it lets companies claim that the forest is helping cut their pollution?
It sounds like the start of a philosophical debate, but isn’t. It’s at the heart of a dispute dividing environment and climate activists, and is being weighed by the Greens ahead of a vote in the Senate next month.
In blunt terms, the minor party is considering whether to make an extraordinary call: to support a Nationals motion to strike down a Labor plan that would create a long-discussed great koala national park in northern New South Wales, and significantly reduce native forest logging in the state.
The vote was scheduled for last week but – in a sign of how vexed the issue has become – has been delayed until next month after the Greens asked the Nationals for more time to reach a consensus position.
In terms of a national political debate, the issue hasn’t had much of a look-in yet. But the ramifications could be substantial.
The story starts with a grassroots campaign to create a large park around Coffs Harbour to protect forests and more than a hundred threatened species, including koalas, gliders and glossy black cockatoos. That campaign is backed by a range of local campaigners and First Nations leaders.
NSW Labor signed up as a supporter more than a decade ago while in opposition. Under the premier, Chris Minns, it wasn’t until September 2025 that it announced it would add 176,000 hectares of state forest – an area more than twice the size of Canberra – to existing protected areas to create a 476,000 hectare reserve. It is said to protect about 12,000 koalas, water catchments and carbon stores.
The final confirmation that the park would go ahead didn’t come until June, when the Albanese government approved a NSW proposal that allows it to use the park to create carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Polluting the debate
Carbon credits remain opaque to most people, but they are the centre of the Australian government’s climate change policy. We need to explain why (bear with me here).
Each credit is said to represent one tonne of greenhouse gas emissions that has been prevented or drawn down from the atmosphere. In Australia, they most often come from projects that are meant to regenerate forests in the outback and capture and burn methane released from landfill sites.
The goal of the projects is sound. Regenerating forests is good! Cutting methane pollution is good! But the projects themselves have been sharply criticised.
Scientific studies have found major shortcomings with the main types of projects used in Australia and elsewhere, suggesting many carbon credits – also known as offsets – do not represent real emissions reductions. But the Albanese government has largely rejected the concerns, and the credits continue to be sold.
Who buys them? Polluting companies. Under the safeguard mechanism – a policy that applies to about 200 big industrial sites – businesses can buy an unlimited number of credits at relatively low cost and claim them as their own emissions cuts.
This is an issue not only due to concern about credit integrity, but also because scientists have repeatedly warned that limiting the climate crisis requires deep and direct cuts to pollution. They say credits should be used sparingly.
It adds up to a strong case for at least a thorough audit of carbon credit projects and significant changes to the safeguard mechanism, which is being reviewed.
Quick GuideWhat is the safeguard mechanism?
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Australia’s safeguard mechanism requires the country’s largest polluting industrial facilities to cut their greenhouse gas emissions intensity year on year.
It applies to about 200 facilities that each year emit more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent in other greenhouse gases. These include mines, gas facilities, processing plants, smelters and manufacturers.
Facility owners can make cuts onsite or by buying carbon offsets.
The policy was introduced in 2016 by the rightwing Coalition government with a promise it would stop industrial emissions increasing. But it was not applied as promised and total pollution from the sites continued to rise.
The Albanese Labor government revamped the scheme in 2023, setting new emissions limits, known as baselines, for each facility.
Under the changes, facilities are required to reduce emissions intensity – the amount of pollution per unit of production – by up to 4.9% a year. Companies can choose whether they make direct cuts or buy carbon offsets to meet their reduction obligations.
They have access to two different types of carbon credits to offset their pollution. They can buy Australian carbon credit units, which are created through government-approved projects said to draw CO2 from the atmosphere or prevent its release.
Or they can also use “safeguard credits”, which are created when a facility emits less than its safeguard baseline. The owner gets one safeguard credit for every tonne of CO2 they are below their baseline. These within-scheme credits can be sold to other polluting facilities that emit more than their baseline and need offsets.
New polluting facilities, including gasfields and coalmines, are allowed to open and enter the scheme with baselines set at “international best practice”. For new gasfields, that means offsetting all CO2 pollution so they are net zero.
A deal between Labor and the Greens introduced an absolute “cap” so that total emissions under the scheme need to come down over time. The pace of reduction was not stipulated under the deal and is set by the climate change minister.
But is this a reason to block a plan that could protect large swathes of forest?
Some campaigners – including the Australia Institute, and the influential former Greens leaders Bob Brown and Christine Milne – say yes. Forcefully.
Part of their argument is that NSW Labor has signalled since 2015 that it would create a koala park and, under carbon accounting rules, credits should be issued only for steps that make emissions lower than they otherwise would have been. In carbon lingo, the reduction has to be “additional”.
The group says the koala park doesn’t pass this test and that taxpayers – not carbon credits – should pay to end the struggling native forestry industry. They have a case. The plan to fund the koala park through the sale of credits was not mentioned initially. And what about protecting nature for its intrinsic values?
Will a cap on logging offset concerns?
But there are counter arguments – made by NSW forest campaigners, First Nations’ groups and the decorated ecologist Prof David Lindenmayer, among others – that are also compelling, and shouldn’t be quickly dismissed.
One is that the method that the Greens are considering blocking – known as “improved native forest management” – was strengthened during development, and isn’t just about the koala park.
The proposed design of the project goes well beyond Labor’s commitment before the 2023 election, when it said it would allocate $80m in funding, which it has, and assess state forests that could be included in a park. It now includes capping logging in the state’s public and private native forests well below average levels over the past decade.
This shouldn’t be underestimated. Some campaigners believe it could rapidly accelerate the decline of native forest logging in the state.
Another is that the number of carbon credits created through the proposal would be relatively small – less than 1% of the total issued annually across Australia. The percentage would remain low even if the method was used to shut down forestry in other parts of NSW, or even Tasmania.
It means the native forest method is not the thing that will decide whether polluters continue to have access to cheap carbon credits.
If that argument is to be fought and won, it will have to be made elsewhere – not in a decision over a Nationals’ motion in the Senate.
Labor and the Greens may yet reach a compromise, possibly by legislating so that credits from protecting forests can only be bought by industries not involved in fossil fuel extraction and production. The NSW government has said it would do this, though it is not clear how it could work.
The incentives for the Greens to do a deal are powerful, even as its elders accuse Labor of bastardry.
It would belatedly protect these forests and their rich biodiversity. That’s no small thing. It is far from guaranteed to happen in a way conservationists would support otherwise. NSW Greens MP Sue Higginson has warned things could get “worse, not better” if the carbon credits plan is disallowed.
In purely political terms, a deal with Labor would mean the party won’t have to spend years trying to defend itself against accusations it abandoned local campaigners and sided with rightwing MPs – and a celebrating forestry industry – to block a landmark koala park.
Is that really the position it wants to be in as it fights to get its message out in a rapidly changing electoral landscape? Perhaps the decision shouldn’t be so complicated after all.
