Little known detail about Aussie wildlife facing extinction
Australia is failing to protect the plants and animals it's listed as threatened with extinction.
Most Aussies assume that once an animal or plant is listed as threatened with extinction, governments will do all they can to protect it. But a leading conservation group is warning that’s simply not the case.
On Threatened Species Day, an alert has been issued that Australia is failing to protect its native species from extinction. In its 2024 report card World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia has given the country F grades in three key areas.
“I do think the Australian public might not realise there are so many species that are in trouble. And they might think that once they’re listed, they’re going to be fine and looked after,” WWF-Australia’s Dr Tracy Rout told Yahoo News.
“But that’s not really the way things are working at the moment.”
Australia receives worst possible score for protecting threatened species
Since the first report card was launched just two years ago, Australia has listed an extra 163 new species as threatened with extinction and 2,245 different plants, animals and ecological communities are now in danger of being lost forever. And on a scale of A to F, the nation was given the worst possible score for funding, recovery planning, and improving the status of threatened species.
While it’s great that so many species in need are being listed, in many cases habitat is left to become infested with weeds and invasive species, and so biodiversity continues to decline. And under Australia’s national Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, developers are often allowed to destroy habitat as long as the impact isn’t considered significant.
“Australia’s nature laws are not working to prevent species from sliding their way to extinction. “A lot are worsening in their status even though they’re listed as threatened,” Rout said.
“But also funding is needed to help their recovery, like controlling predators that might be eating them, or even captive breeding programs when numbers get really low.”
Are Australia's environment protections improving?
With so many competing messages in the media about the state of our environment, the report card was developed with the University of Queensland to provide regular scientific updates on the state of Australia’s environment.
“We’ve created something that clearly communicates scientific data to the Australian public and people in power,” Rout said.
Although most of the scores Australia received have remained static since 2022, the nation has improved slightly in its efforts to protect land, inching just over the line from a D to a C.
"Its gone from around 20 to 22 per cent of Australia's land, but there are some species that don't have any of their habitat protected," Rout added.
The nation's best performing category was Persistence which received a B — this measures how long a species is likely to survive in the short term.
Extraordinary story of Aussie species the world thought was extinct
One species that’s been protected under Australian environment laws but still faces an uncertain future is the parma wallaby. It had been thought to be extinct until the 1960s when a small population was discovered on an island off New Zealand.
They’d been shipped there in the 1860s as part of a plan to populate Kawau Island with exotic species and been forgotten about. Since then a small population was rediscovered on the NSW Central Coast and breeding programs were facilitated at zoos around Australia.
An important population of around 200 has also been thriving at a property in the Blue Mountains, with their ongoing protection self-funded by businessman and conservationist Peter Pigott to the tune of $2 million.
With the property in need of ongoing maintenance, and its owner now 88 years of age, efforts are being made by WWF-Australia and the NSW government to help relocate some of the wallabies elsewhere.
Its rewilding manager Rob Brewster told Yahoo News the team is working to wean them off a supplementary diet of wallaby pellets, carrots and sweet potatoes and teach them to be wary of humans.
“Peter’s done a fantastic job of looking after what’s probably the largest population of parma wallabies in existence… it shows the greatness that one person can achieve when they put their mind to something,” he said.
It’s unknown how many wallabies are in the wild today and they are believed to be thin on the ground. While this species has received attention because of its remarkable story of survival, there are hundreds of other lesser-known species that are largely forgotten and at risk of vanishing forever.
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