Australia’s environment is sick and getting sicker as the combined effects of climate change, pollution, land clearing and mining take a dangerous toll, a landmark report says.
The State of the Environment report is a five-yearly health check on the natural ecosystems that underpin every aspect of life in Australia, and the news is resoundingly bad.
“Overall, the state and trend of the environment of Australia are poor and deteriorating,” says a summary of the 2000-page document, which will be released in full on Tuesday.
It details “abrupt” changes in ecological systems over the last five years with climate change adding a devastating new layer to the accumulation of other threats.
The result is a growing list of threatened species trying to survive in shrinking and degraded ecosystems that are being ineffectively managed with too little money, it says.
“Our inability to adequately manage pressures will continue to result in species extinctions and deteriorating ecosystem condition, which are reducing the environmental capital on which current and future economies depend.”
The report, which the former Morrison government refused to release before the election, has been variously described by its chief authors as stark and depressing.
Speaking to ABC on Tuesday, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek flagged an overhaul of regulation and more investment in order to protect the environment.
She branded the report as “shocking” as it details “abrupt” changes in ecological systems over the last five years with climate change adding a devastating new layer to the accumulation of other threats.
One of the report’s three chief authors is former CSIRO research director Dr Ian Cresswell. He said an absence of national leadership and investment had cost the nation dearly, and it must stop.
“We’re going to lose the Australia that we grew up with, for future generations, if we don’t truly start dealing with some of the environmental problems,” he said.
The report says Australia lacks a framework to manage the environment in a comprehensive way and instead relies on a jumble of systems across different tiers of government.
The number of new species listed as threatened, or up-listed to a higher category of threat, has increased by eight per cent since 2016 and will jump again due to Black Summer bushfires, it warns.
Despite that, monitoring of threatened species and communities is “mostly inadequate” with up to 46 per cent of threatened vertebrates, 69 per cent of threatened plants and 70 per cent of threatened ecological communities not monitored at all.
Meanwhile, a staggering 7.7 million hectares of habitat for land-based threatened species was cleared between 2000 and 2017. But almost all of that – 7.1 million hectares – wasn’t assessed under federal environmental laws.
The latest report includes, for the first time, new chapters on climate and extreme events including recent floods, terrestrial and marine heatwaves, droughts, and bushfires.
The report’s co-chief author, professor of marine ecology Emma Johnston, said previous reports talked about climate impacts mostly in the future tense.
“But in this report we document wide-scale impacts of climate-related extreme events across the nation and that has compounded existing threats – land clearing, invasive species, pollution,” she said.
The report also charts the drop in federal government spending on biodiversity while risks have been increasing.
Since 2010, biodiversity expenditure remained between $400 and $500 million per year, then dipped below $300 million in 2018–19, and has been under $400 million thereafter, the report says.
Ms Plibersek said Australians deserved to see the report, which her predecessor Sussan Ley received last year. Ms Ley refused to release it despite calls from its authors.
The report, written by 37 expert authors, is a comprehensive assessment of the state of the environment, the pressures it’s facing and how well, or not, it is being managed.
