How land clearing – and 400,000 dump trucks of mud – is choking the reef

The most important thing the government can do to save the Great Barrier Reef starts in a cow paddock, according to Lyndon Schneiders.

Schneiders, who is the director of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, said 40 per cent of all land clearing in Queensland occurs in catchments that feed into the reef.

Land cleared for cattle grazing contributed more than half of the 4.9 million tonnes of sediment in the last reported year, Schneiders said.

“When you remove vegetation, you’re removing the root structure, you’re often burning it, you’re often removing the native grass covers … then, because it’s Queensland, you know, the big rains come,” he said.

That sediment then floats out over the reef from the Burdekin and Fitzroy rivers, choking seagrass and coral by starving them of light.

In a report released today, A Muddy Mess: Land Clearing and the Great Barrier Reef, Schneiders, says 400,000 dump trucks worth of mud are pushed through rivers onto the reef every year, and he has called on the federal government to put its new(ish) environmental protection laws into action.

The report argues that the laws, passed last year, should be used to identify the worst areas for erosion, create no-go zones for land clearing, and go a step further.

“They’ve given themselves the powers that they didn’t previously have to regulate clearing activities in these catchments, but [under] the system as it is right now, each individual landholder has to assess whether or not it’s going to be a problem and then make a referral,” Schneiders said.

“Each one in isolation may or may not have a significant impact on water quality but together, they have an impact.”

Since 2014, federal and state governments have pledged (and spent) more than $2 billion on the reef’s health, often with the added note that the tourism hotspot supports 77,000 jobs and contributes $90 billion annually to the economy. But the latest Reef Report Card still gives their efforts a “poor” rating for sediment reduction.

In his report, Schneiders found 856,744 hectares of forest and woodland were cleared in the reef’s catchments between 2018 and 2023 – 84 per cent of it for grazing. However, it should be noted that that period was before the new laws came into effect.

Since then, the federal Environment Department has provided advice to 270 landholders who have contacted it about land clearing.

“We need to look at the combined impacts of all these clearing proposals and understand where the no-go zones are, turn that into a regulatory map that provides certainty for landholders [and] prov