The Federal Government says it will review a draft World Heritage Committee decision, which rejects an application to delist some Tasmanian forests.

Meanwhile, light has been shed on the lobby group pushing the Federal Government to allow the logging.

The Coalition government wants to de-list 74,000 hectares of forest from the official World Heritage Area registry, saying they should not be protected.

The argument has been raised by the Australian Environment Foundation, a lobby set up by the conservative Institute of Public Affairs think tank in 2004.

The foundation has reportedly contacted to every member of UNESCO’s 21-nation world heritage committee, to implore them to back the plan to remove large sections of forest from protection.

The UNESCO committee will hand down its final decision next month, but the draft has indicated there is not enough information behind the plan.

Environment Minister Greg Hunt has found some encouragement in the draft rejection.

He says he is happy to see that UNESCO’s figures show there will be slightly less destructive of ancient forests than the Government had planned.

“The overall finding is that only 45 per cent of the entire area was in any way old growth, so in other words 55 per cent had been logged,” Mr Hunt said.

“These were actually higher figures than we had submitted, so I think you'll find it's a very significant finding, we'll let the committee go through the process.”

Environmentalists, members of the general public and the Tasmanian Indigenous community have all expressed levels of outrage at the efforts to remove protection on forests just a few years after they were put in place.

Dr Phil Pullinger from Environment Tasmania, a signatory to the Tasmanian Forests Agreement, said the politicians making the calls had never even sen the forest they want logged.

‘There's no way that anyone with an appreciation of those forests, who's seen them, seen how magnificent they are, would genuinely think they shouldn't be part of our World Heritage Area,” he told the ABC.

Indigenous groups have labelled the de-listing as “shameful”, and say they were not consulted over changes to the environment on which their culture is based. 

A Senate inquiry report published last week found that the proposed delisting is “fundamentally flawed” and should not go ahead.

The Senate committee found evidence that just a small section of the 74,000ha could be described as “degraded” by previous logging, and that 48% of the area is old-growth forest.

“It can only be concluded that the vast majority of the area proposed for delisting is intact native vegetation and not degraded areas,” the Senate report states.

“The committee further notes that even though an area may be considered 'degraded', this does not, in itself, automatically justify its exclusion from world heritage listing.”

Max Rheese is executive director of the Australian Environment Foundation, the lobby which has publically stated that wind farms damage human health and that mainstream climate science is false scare-mongering perpetuated for research money.

Mr Rheese has told Guardian Australia that the protection of Tasmania’s forests somehow goes against World Heritage principles.

“It seems it was done for political expediency, with no conservation merit in it,” he said.

“The world heritage committee should start all over again.

“We are locking up ever increase amounts of forest from resource use, whether that be timber harvesting, mining or grazing. I don’t see any of those things being incompatible with conservation, they’ve operated side by side for many years,” he said.

The Federal Government has blamed the mess on its Labor predecessor.