Australia is one of 17 “megadiverse” countries that account for 70% of Earth’s biodiversity. However, Australia is unique in having the highest mammalian extinction rate in the world. That makes conservation on the island continent, where most of the wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth, all the more urgent.
Conservation and environmental scientists have come out against the Australian federal government’s claim that it’s “on track” to meet most of its targets under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework agreed upon at the U.N. biodiversity summit in 2022. This week on the Mongabay Newscast, Euan Ritchie, a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at Australia’s Deakin University, and a councilor with the Biodiversity Council, an academic alliance in the country, argues why conservationists say the Australian government is failing its commitments.
“The short answer, unfortunately, is that Australia is doing terribly in terms of honoring its international obligations to meet those targets in the agreement. If we look at the number of threatened species in Australia, it’s more than 2,200 now, and that list continues to increase,” Ritchie says.
Despite being a relatively wealthy nation by gross domestic product per capita, Australia funds conservation at a diminutive scale compared to other industrialized countries. The latest annual budget allocates 0.06% of federal spending to nature. Ritchie and some 60 fellow experts suggest that it would only take about 1% of the federal budget to save most threatened species and restore soils and rivers. In 2024, the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists published its findings, which took six years to complete.
The Biodiversity Council has separately found that around 95% of Australians surveyed would support increased spending on the environment.
“Essentially, the federal government is ignoring a majority of Australians by not doing that,” Ritchie says.
He argues the money to fund conservation already exists — or at least could easily exist by reducing subsidies for harmful industries (such as the fossil fuel industry), which currently amount to around A$26 billion ($19 billion) a year. Separately, a 25% tax on liquefied natural gas exports could generate A$17 billion ($12 billion) a year, a move nationwide polling suggests is supported by 70% of Australians.
Despite the perceived strong public support, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has ruled out a 25% tax on gas exports for the time being, which Ritchie says is very hard to understand, pointing to countries like Norway, which built its own sovereign wealth fund off similar measures. As of this writing, the Australian government has lost about A$70 billion ($50 billion) in revenue it could have collected had it taxed these resources, according to an online tracker by the Australia Institute, an independent think tank.
“We could bring in tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue if we taxed the resources that we are giving away, essentially in many cases for free,” Ritchie says.
Instead of increasing direct conservation funding, the Australian government intends to close the gap by launching a “Nature Repair Market,” a voluntary biodiversity offset scheme. It’s essentially a way for industry and private investors to pay for the damage they cause. Research indicates this is unlikely to protect endangered wildlife and biodiversity without taxpayer funding. Other researchers from the University of Melbourne and the University of New South Wales have also weighed in, explaining that a biodiversity market is unlikely to work.
Ritchie says this is problematic for a number of other reasons, ranging from the complexity of biodiversity itself, to the way the government intends to measure environmental impacts from various projects. Currently, the national environmental standards in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) doesn’t “account for cumulative impacts,” Ritchie says.
“So if you imagine that you’re a threatened species and you’re widely distributed … Individual projects are not being assessed in relation to other projects that may also impact on that same species,” he says. “So it is literally death by a thousand cuts.”
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Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Banner image: Black-flanked rock wallaby (Petrogale lateralis) in Cape Range National Park, Western Australia, Australia. The Australian government has classed the species as endangered under the EPBC Act. Image by Dsyzdek via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Waldron, A., Miller, D., Redding, D. , Mooers, A., Kuhn, T. S., Nibbelink, N., … Gittleman, J. L. (2017). Reductions in global biodiversity loss predicted from conservation spending. Nature, 551(7680), 364-367. doi:10.1038/nature24295
Euan Ritchie: I think the international community really does need to put more pressure on Australia to do better. We are, as I said earlier, one of the richest nations on Earth. We have a huge number of really knowledgeable scientists. We have species, in most cases, that are found nowhere else on Earth. So in terms of endemic species, 80, 90 percent for many groups, or more. So I would actually like to see a lot more pressure put on Australia in international circles to do a better job because we, of all countries, along with the United States and some others, have a role to be leaders here because we have the resources and capabilities of doing that.
Mike DiGirolamo: Welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. I’m your host, Mike DiGirolamo, bringing you weekly conversations with experts, authors, scientists, and activists working on the front lines of conservation, shining a light on some of the most pressing issues facing our planet and holding people in power to account. This podcast is edited on Gadigal land. Today on the newscast, we speak with Euan Ritchie, a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at Deakin University, president of the Australian Mammal Society, and a councillor for the Biodiversity Council. Australia is one of 17 nations on the planet that are considered megadiverse. Together, these 17 countries, which cover less than 10% of the Earth’s surface, hold 70% of its biodiversity. Australia is arguably unique among them because 80% of its invertebrate life forms are found nowhere else in the world, while 93% of its flowering plants are also endemic. My guest this week argues that Australia, despite claiming it is on track to meet many of its targets under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, is actually failing on quite a few of them, and he outlines the reasons why, emphasizing that because Australia is one of the wealthiest countries by GDP per capita, it has the resources to directly fund conservation and should, given how much of its biodiversity is endemic. Research suggests that allocating just 1% of the annual Australian federal budget could largely save threatened species and protect ecosystems. Instead, the Australian federal government has allocated conservation funding in its newly released annual budget at 0.06%, and this is set to decline in future years. Ritchie and other concerned scientists say that this is the wrong path for conservation and that the government’s proposed Nature Repair Market, which is a voluntary biodiversity credit scheme that is yet to come online, will not solve the problem. Ritchie emphasizes that protecting nature can be achieved relatively efficiently with key steps the government can afford and argues that it has an obligation to the international community to do so. Euan Ritchie, welcome to the Mongabay Newscast. It’s great to have you with us.
Mike: You’re a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at Deakin University here in Australia, and you’ve studied the environment and environmental policy and protection here for quite a long time. So can you tell our listeners, how is Australia doing on meeting its commitments under the global biodiversity framework that was agreed upon at Kunming-Montreal?
Euan: The short answer, unfortunately, is that Australia is doing terribly in terms of honoring its international obligations to meet those targets in the agreement. If we look at the number of threatened species in Australia, it’s more than 2,200 now, and that list continues to increase. We have ecosystems that are collapsing, 17 in total within Australia and two more further south into sub-Antarctic and Antarctic regions that are collapsing. So a range of ecosystems are showing signs of collapse. The koala, an iconic animal that’s known the world over, is now endangered in Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT. The State of Environment report, which is a very large report that’s done every couple of years or so, in 2021 showed that Australia’s environmental condition is poor and still deteriorating. And environmental funding, which is a key part, of course, of protecting biodiversity but also promoting its recovery, is around 0.06% of the annual budget at the moment, so less than 1%, and it’s forecast to decrease to less than half a percent in two years’ time. So we’ve just had the federal budget. Some of the goals for 2050 under that agreement that you mentioned include ecosystem integrity and species conservation, equitable access and benefit sharing, and means of implementation, and on all those measures Australia is failing miserably. And this is all despite the fact that Australia is one of the richest countries on Earth. We’re really lucky to have a large number of world-leading environmental scientists and climate scientists and conservation scientists. So we have the knowledge. We’re aware of the issues. It really is a failure of governments of many persuasions and a lack of investment. It’s not the capability of turning this around. It’s just that, unfortunately, governments have failed to act on what we know is occurring.
