CANBERRA, Australia (Reuters) – Farmers in Australia’s northern state of Queensland will no longer have the right to clear vast areas of native vegetation, in a move that environmental groups welcomed.
Queensland was the last state to regulate land clearing for broad-scale farming. The destruction of native vegetation has been blamed for killing millions of native animals and increasing salinity of the nation’s rivers.
“This is the biggest single environmental gain in Australian history,” said Wilderness Society spokesperson Barry Traill. “Until controls were put in place, Queensland was one of the worst hot spots for environmental destruction on Earth.”
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Australia, alongside the United States, has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions and the federal government has ruled out a national form of carbon trading to try to cut emissions widely believed to cause global warming.
But Queensland premier Peter Beattie, who introduced the new ban on land clearing, said it would save his state an estimated 20 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year.
Queensland and neighbouring New South Wales are major coal producers but have come under pressure from environmental groups to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.
