Distinguished Professor Bill Laurance TESS JCU, speaking about the Wet Tropics generally, then the Myola Valley specifically:

“On the Australian continent, we’re talking about 1,000th of Australia’s continental land area. 

A major analysis which looked at the biogeographic and the biological uniqueness and irreplaceability of different ecosystems on the planet – this was over 173,000 different protected areas on the planet – ranked the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area as the 6th most critical and irreplaceable.

Of World Heritage Areas, it was the 2nd most critical and irreplaceable.  I think this gives you global perspective on what we’re talking about here.

Anybody, from anywhere on the planet, looking around would say this is absolutely critical biological and environmental real estate.

You would not want to risk it – from an International, from a global perspective – for lots of different reasons.”
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“KUR-World… I want to provide some general perspectives on this.

Again, one of the obvious things is being, this is by any measure, one of the most biologically critical areas of the planet.  It’s renowned for having all these rare, endemic species.

These are things that can occur in a very, very tiny part of the world.

[pictured] These are some of the species that have been documented to be restricted or rare or localised endemics that occur within this general area, within the [KUR-World] project area.”
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“Landscape context.  Bio-geographic context is critical. What we’re in right here is really one of the critical bottlenecks. It’s really the critical bottleneck – the so called Black Mountain Bio-Geographic Corridor and it’s the narrowest choke point for the Wet Tropics.”
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“What you generally don’t want in these bottlenecks is you don’t want to elevate land use pressures.  You don’t want to choke these bottlenecks even further by additional kinds of development pressures.”

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