The Australian Biodiversity Council outlines the depth of the extinction crisis 

an interview with Prof Brendan Wintle

Although deeply interconnected with climate, the seriousness of species extinction has not yet reached the public consciousness. Over the past 20 years, the climate wars have chewed through so much political bandwidth that species extinction has been largely ignored. And yet, the idea that we are experiencing the Sixth Mass Extinction is now accepted by a growing number of scientists, 70% at last count. According to peer-reviewed literature species extinction is running at 1000 times the natural background rate and 70 times that of the last Mass Extinction. This occurred 65.5 million years ago and spanned a few thousand years, wiping out 75% of the planet’s biota. By contrast, and damningly, the current extinction event has wiped out about 25% in the space of a few hundred years.

Brendan Wintle, Australia’s leading champion for biodiversity, says the Threatened Species Index developed by the TRSH hub that he led showed Australian birds, lizards and plants had fallen by 50-70% since 1980, and this maps onto the global Living Planet Index by UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (headed by Prof Sandra Diaz). Brendan says that 85% of the world’s wetlands have been lost since the 1700s. Roughly 25% of all known 8 million species are at risk of extinction, not including bacteria adding another 1.7 million. 

“In Australia, there are now more introduced plants and animals than native living on the continent. About 19 of 86 major ecosystems on the brink of complete collapse.” 

“Extinction is forever,” says Brendan, “and it’s deeply interlinked with climate.”

For example, Brendan explains as just one example that some of the dominant species in the Alpine forests of the High Country need at least 20 years to mature. “The problem is that the return rate for megafires has shifted from every 80 years in 1910 to every eight years since 2020. There’s just not enough time for ecologies to recover. What’s more, Ash forests hold carbon and filter water, so collapse then feeds into the climate crisis in the opposite direction.”

Similar issues afflict marine ecologies because of coral bleaching or the similarly climate-induced rapacity of spiny urchins creating urchin barrens along Australia’s coasts. “As the urchins march southwards, they devastate the kelp forests in which all our major marine species live, grow and reproduce. Beneath the waves we have underwater tracts of devastation that, were they visible above the surface, would immediately incite public outrage akin to what we see when vast tracts of land are razed by fires.” 

The key threats, says Brendan, are habitat loss from major landclearing for urban development and agriculture, combined with invasive species. Cats, foxes and rabbits, and plants like lantana and black berries, are the age-old culprits, and we still need stronger laws and funding to contain them, says Brendan. 

History of the Biodiversity Council

The Biodiversity Council has emerged victorious after the coalition government’s secrecy and mishandling of the former Threatened Species Recovery Hub, of which Brendan was director. 

“When it came to the recovery hubs, we lost,” says Brendan. “At the time, Sussan Ley removed seven species recovery hubs. You can see the background to that work in the documentary, Extinction Nation (2019), and in a Four Corners expose I contradict the Minister directly. The program ended in 2020 after all the work we did on the species impact of the megafires. Since 2020, we’ve lost 7 million hectares of habitat from fires, coal mines and clearing, roughly the size of Tasmania. And in 2021, the State of the Environment Report was sat on for months by Sussan Ley and Scott Morrison precisely because it highlighted their lack of action in the midst of an election.”

Not to be held back, Brendan and colleagues pushed ahread with The Biodiversity Council, which evolved after two successive reviews of national environmental laws and a host of political mishandling leading up to the present day and the upcoming election promising to do battle over energy and climate. The two major reviews included the Samuel Review submitted in the latter portion of 2020 and the State of the Environment Report of 2021, witheld from publication by the coalition government of the time.

We had a conference in 2019 that drove the development of the Biodiversity Council. After delivering a plenary session on Australian land conservation, Brendan was approached by the Ian Potter Foundation and asked what’s next.

He replied ‘A voice for nature!’

With the support of the Ian Potter Foundation, the Council was set up with 39 councillors, about one third representing universities with evidence-based expertise that was place-based — for example, everything from deserts to the Murray Darling, from kelp to the Barrier Reef — and a strong emphasis on about one third representing First Nations.

“We needed experts who fully understood deep ecological contexts supported by another two thirds representing law, economics, social sciences, anthropology and culture — the broader ‘people’ aspect in ‘people and place’.”

We were focused on good planning at the regional scale, underpinned by good data, to help improve the efficiency of development approvals and get better outcomes for nature. This aimed to expedite the recommendations of the Samuel Review whilst addressing the parlous state of the nation’s ecological reserves outlined in the State of the Environment Report. 

The Samuel Review was the statutory review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) commenced in 2019 under former competition watchdog head Professor Graeme Samuel AC and an expert panel. It found successive governments had failed to stem the decline of Australia’s wildlife and called for an overhaul of environmental protections — stronger laws to protect nature.

The Nature Positive Plan of 2022 promised strong environmental laws to address the extiinction crisis, including no new human induced extinctions after 2030. The problem was that the plan was broken down into modules and the sequence of two key aspects were reversed, such that everybody wasted time on the Nature Repair Market (NRM), where private stakeholders would invest in biodiversity credits, similar to the carbon credit scheme. 

“If we do it, great, but this remains a tertiary priority for us. Our main priority now is to focus on restoration and integrate climate and biodiversity awareness with sensitive ecological planning, stronger laws, more funding and action on species protection, all supported by stronger public awareness.” 

Energy Transitions Must Protect Nature

We must minimise climate change but at the same time we have to be careful about how we do it, says Brendan. For example, Andrew Forrest is clearing about 700 hectares of native forest for windfarms. In the right places, renewables that are low impact could make us net energy exporters in the near future but we need to make sure that everything from windfarms to transmission lines are implemented without further damage to habitats. 

“Nuclear is a wasted discussion and we need to get the renewables transition right from the outset,” says Brendan.

Brendan published a paper in The Conversation a few weeks ago in which he said “if humanity’s efforts to mitigate climate change end up damaging nature, we shoot ourselves in the foot. We’re putting wind turbines in rainforests, transmission lines in culturally significant sites.”

Take, for example, the proposed Euston wind farm in southwest New South Wales. It would entail 96 turbines built near the Willandra Lakes World Heritage area, potentially affecting threatened birds. And in North Queensland, the Upper Burdekin wind farm proposal will remove 769 hectares of endangered species habitat relied on by Sharman’s wallabies, koalas and northern greater gliders. The cleared area would be almost 200 times bigger than the Melbourne Cricket Ground.

Map of Queensland. Darker green indicates habitats for a larger number of species. Existing and proposed renewable energy projects are in bright red. Existing transmission infrastructure in blue.

A proposal to build a renewable energy microgrid in Queensland’s Daintree rainforest is another case in point. It is causing pain for local communities, pitting renewable energy advocates against conservation organisations. A major challenge to energy development in Queensland, as in some other parts of Australia, is a lack of transmission infrastructure, or ‘poles and wires’, in the places where renewable energy and nature could most happily coexist. 

This infrastructure should urgently be developed in a way that does not impact natural vegetation and species habitats, says Brendan. 

“Our mapping for potential wind and solar projects in southern Queensland shows strong potential west of the Great Dividing Range for energy generation without the same level of land-use conflict with natural values and productive agriculture.”

The Future

Brendan says there was much hope when the ALP won leadership but there have been a series of persistent disappointments over unfulfilled promises. Meanwhile, as we head towards election territory in the latter half of 2024, the issue of energy will be central, and the ways in which we manage the energy transition must uphold the principles of the ALP’s nature Positive Plan. 

David Shelmerdine, who advises industry on nature positive solutions with Monash University, says we’ve won the war on climate change; the next battle is protecting nature. Brendan goes further.

“To me the main point is that we can’t meet our climate goals without addressing Nature. If we can’t protect Nature, we are lost.”

Brendan says the World Economic Forum now rates biodiversity loss in the top risks to the global economy and there has been a recent shift from preservation of endangered species to threatened species recovery and restoration. This is a major shift in focus.

“We need to restore the systems that support us and achieve the public recognition that other species are needed to sustain our way of life and our economies. We need the political will to implement the laws we already have. Presently, we are failing to enforce the existing rules to protect habitats, let alone provide the funds to do the work.”

What we need now are three things: stronger laws, funding of about $2 billion per year to prevent any further extinctions, and restoration, which is estimated to cost about $5-10 billion. For context, this is not a lot of money for such an important issue — it’s far less than the $35 billion we spend on care for domestic dogs and cats. Or in another context, we raise $10-13 billion from fuel tax credits.”

Climate is on the agenda for the ALP but not Nature as yet, warns Brendan. 

“For climate, we even have the LNP putting up whacky nuclear plans. There is some progress, including the Climate Council, but we’re a long way off for Nature and biodiversity. The big issue is public awareness and motivation to act, and I’d like to see a sharper focus of the Greens on biodiversity.” 

“The idea of the Biodiversity Council is that we need an expert voice for biodiversity, one that is evidence-based. Globally we have ACF and WWF but in Australia we didn’t have a base that included social sciences and economists to support action on biodiversity via media and social engagement. The main things we need to get across is why we, as a society, depend on biodiversity, and, secondaly, how is it changing. This needs a bottom-up surge of engagement driven by the public upwards to shift the dialogue in media and government.” 

“As we head into the next term, we’ll be working on that. So look out. This is a key year for Australia’s ecology and our planetary future.”

Former director of the Threatened Species Recovery Hub (TSRH), Brendan is the founder of the new, national Biodiversity Council set up to protect endangered species. He is also former director of the National Environmental Science Program (NESP), a long-term commitment by the Australian Government to deliver collaborative, practical and applied research to inform decision making and on-ground action on species protection.