The Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Area

The Wet Tropics World Heritage Area lies between Townsville and Cooktown on the north-east coast of Queensland and covers an area of 894,420 hectares.

The Wet Tropics is renowned for scenic panoramas of rainforest canopy from mountain lookouts, rivers that carve through rugged gorges and cascade into freshwater swimming holes, giant trees and ferns from ancient eras and curiosities from the animal kingdom. It has Australia’s greatest diversity of animals and plants within an area of just 0.26% of the continent. Many plant and animal species in the Wet Tropics are found nowhere else in the world. The diverse range of vegetation communities are habitat to numerous rare and threatened species.

The Wet Topics has the oldest continously surviving tropical rainforests on earth. They are a living museum of how land plants have evolved since the break up of Gondwana 40 million years ago, from ancient ferns, conifers and cycads to the more highly evolved flowering plants. The Wet Tropics is also a
living record of the evolutionary history of animals – being home to some species that have changed little since ancient times such as the musky rat-kangaroo and the chowchilla.

You can read more by downloading the World Heritage brochure [1.6MB].

Managing the World Heritage Area

This section of the website contains a vast amount of information about how the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area is managed by the Wet Tropics Managment Authority in partnership with government agencies, land managers, landholders, Rainforest Aboriginal people, the tourism industry, conservation and community groups, and the broader community.

Right to information and publication scheme

You can read about the Authority and its policies, decisons, services, priorities and lists in the publication scheme. The scheme provides easy links to a wealth of information available on the website as part of the Queensland Government's Right to information.

Wet Tropics legislation

There are numerous pages about the Wet Tropics Management Plan and how it works to manage the Area. You can find out about the Wet Tropics permit system and the zoning maps under the legislation. You can also downlaod details of our section 62 guidelines which assist with assessing permit applications and are often part of permit conditions.

Policies and strategies

These pages also conatin a summary of the Authority's policies and strategies to manage the Area, and you can download the detailed documents. See the policies page under the publication scheme for a summary.

WTMA Board and committees

You can find information about the WTMA Board and its committees and advisory groups in this section. See the Board page for information about Board decisions and links to the committees and advisory groups.

Threats to the World Heritage Area

Information about threats to the World Heritage Area can be found in the separate threats section of website. Threats include climate change, habitat fragmentation, weeds, feral animals, diseases, urban development, altered fire regimes and altered water flows and drainage.

Tenures in the Area

Within the World Heritage Area's 3,125 km (1,800 mile) boundary there are over 730 separate parcels of land including National Parks, State Forest, Freehold (private) land and a range of leases over public land. World Heritage listing does not affect land ownership and about two per cent of the World Heritage Area remains privately owned (about 115 separate parcels of land within or partly within the Area). Because of the complex land tenure, many people ranging from private land owners to government agencies are actively involved in managing the World Heritage Area. There are also about 2,500 parcels of land neighbouring the World Heritage Area.

Download a map of the various tenures in the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area