Open letter - End Native Logging in Victoria- from ACF Community groups and others to Minister D'Ambrosio
END NATIVE FOREST LOGGING IN VICTORIA
We invite you to join your voice to ours in asking the Hon. Lily D’Ambrosio, Minister for Environment and Climate Action, to act to end native forest logging in Victoria.
Logging our beautiful, irreplaceable forests increases the likelihood of severe bushfires and compromises the quality of our water whilst leaving 60% of the forest on the ground.
Logging is destroying the habitat of hundreds of unique plants and animals and driving their ecosystems to collapse.
We stand together representing more than 40 environmental groups including ACF NXNW, ACF Chisholm, ACF Macnamara, ACF Inner Melbourne, Australian Parents for Climate Action and many many thousands of voters around Victoria, both in marginal metropolitan seats and regional areas, to ask the Victorian State Government to end native forest logging by 2024.
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Victorians deeply appreciate the forests of this state, benefiting from a multitude of ecosystem services as well as recreation. Forests provide the city of Melbourne with fresh drinking water, clean air and ecotourism opportunities. It has been clear for many years now that the overwhelming majority of Victorians want to see forests protected into the future so that they can continue to benefit, as well as future generations to come.
These places are home to some of the state's most unique and threatened wildlife which needs our urgent protection and the government's genuine attention.
We are destroying a crucial part of the beauty that draws visitors to Victoria- and some of the most carbon-dense forests in the world.
The State Government has pledged to end logging by 2030, but eight more years of logging native forests, and the failure to regenerate a significant proportion of them, means continued biodiversity loss, amplified bushfire risk and marginalises First Nations peoples who, as custodians of Country where the logging takes place, find its continued destruction painful.
On environmental, moral and economic grounds native forest logging must end as soon as possible - eight years is too long. Victorians already oppose logging and would readily support a rapid cessation, particularly if they were informed that affected workers can transition to appropriate alternative employment and that there are major economic and environmental benefits for all of Victoria.
This cannot wait. There is an urgent need to bring forward the 2030 end-date of native forest logging to 2024.
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This is a petition run by ACF Community groups in Victoria. By signing the open letter you are granting permission for the ACF Community to contact you.