By Mike DiGirolamo

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.”

Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast here.

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).

Related listening:

Citation:

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

Transcript

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

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.

Euan: Pleasure to be here.

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.

Mike: Yeah, and this is where I find this confusing because, and do correct me if I’m wrong, it seems like the government is actually claiming that it’s on track on a number of targets. And I’d like you to unpack that for us because there was the seventh national report to the Convention on Biological Diversity this past February, on February 28, and it claims some progress on meeting the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. But independent analyses show that the government gives more than $26 billion annually in financial support and tax breaks that harm nature, such as fossil fuel subsidies. And these were not included in the report, from what I understand. So what do you make of this? What do you make of that $26 billion gap and also the disparity between what scientists and conservationists are saying and what the government is saying?

Euan: Yeah, that’s right. Look, I think it’s important to put things into perspective, and it is really important, of course, to celebrate successes where they occur. So there are species, as an example, that are on the path to recovery, like the northern hairy-nosed wombat, which was fewer than 50 individuals in the wild at one point and is now over 400 and is now in multiple populations. The numbat is another iconic mammal. But I remember, of course, when the government said that they’re on target to meet some of those goals, and it was absolutely criticized quite heavily by lots of scientists because we know from what I’ve just been saying before to you that we have an increasing threatened species list, ecosystems in the tropics, in alpine regions, in tropical savannas, in the arid zone. All of those areas are showing signs of collapse, and we’re simply not stopping the key threats to biodiversity. And that, of course, includes directly funding or subsidizing, if you like, things like the fossil fuel industry to the tune of billions of dollars when, at the same time, scientists and conservation organizations have said that we should have at least 1% of the annual federal budget, which would be about $7 billion, I think it is, per year. We’re not even remotely close to that. We also have really absurd things like the federal government going to UNESCO and trying to argue with UNESCO to get a decision that the Great Barrier Reef is not in danger, when clearly the science shows, just by looking at the Great Barrier Reef, there’s been multiple bleaching events in recent years, and they have been severe. In some cases, of course, there might be some minor recovery of those reefs, but there’s close succession of those bleaching events, and in many cases, the reef is not recovering. It’s changing to a different state, largely an ecosystem dominated by algae with corresponding different fishes that are different to coral fish.

Mike: Let’s talk about this really quick. There’s something called the World Heritage Committee, which is made up of 21 member states that meets once a year to discuss the protection of cultural and natural sites around the world. The Great Barrier Reef is one of over 1,000 sites on the World Heritage List. There’s another list, though, that’s called the In Danger List, and these are sites that are, quote, “facing severe ascertained or potential threats such as armed conflict, pollution, or unchecked development that require emergency international support.” Unquote. And the UN informed Australia last year that it had six months before the Great Barrier Reef would be put on this In Danger List, which has about 53 sites. And through a number of interventions, which reports say included political lobbying, Australia managed to keep the Great Barrier Reef off that list. But as Ritchie points out, it does not mean the Great Barrier Reef is safe. Most conservationists would agree with him that the Great Barrier Reef is still in danger.

Euan: No one sensible could say that the Great Barrier Reef is not in danger, and yet that is exactly what our federal government is trying to argue with UNESCO, presumably so that they don’t have this poor reputation that one of the great natural wonders of the world is declining rapidly in front of our eyes.

Mike: And from what I understand, they did admit they were behind track on Target 2, which is ecosystem restoration, but they didn’t actually quantify how behind they were, from what I understand. So how far behind do you understand us to be in ecosystem restoration?

Euan: Yeah. And I think this is part of the problem, that scientists like myself and others, we work with numbers, and we want people to be clear about, when you make a statement, to what degree has an ecosystem recovered? You can spend money on ecosystem recovery and so forth, but when you have 19 ecosystems that span Australia right down to the sub-Antarctic and Antarctic, and these cover essentially the entire continent of Australia, and they’re all showing severe signs of collapse, it’s very hard to argue that you’re on track to recover ecosystems. And another thing that’s really important to remember as well is that there’s this target of 30 by 30, 30% of land and water and so forth being under some form of environmental protection, and we’re simply not on target to meet that. But even the areas that are being, in some cases, set aside are not the highest biodiversity value areas. Establishing national parks in areas that might already be heavily degraded but that are not wanted, as an example, by agriculture, you’re not getting a huge biodiversity benefit for that, as opposed to potentially selecting areas that have really high biodiversity value. They might be more expensive to purchase and set aside for conservation reserves. And the same, of course, applies to fisheries. If we are not putting our marine parks in the areas that have the highest values for marine biodiversity, yes, you can meet that 30%, but it’s not going to be a wonderful 30% in terms of protecting biodiversity. So I think the key message in all of this really is that the government needs to be far clearer about statements that it’s making when it says that it’s meeting its goals. To what degree? To put some numbers around that. So there’s a lot of rhetoric, but often, as you just mentioned, when it comes to having clarity about what’s actually been achieved, it’s often very vague and opaque.

Mike: And as I understand it, we have not actually secured 30% of our land for protection.

Euan: That’s right.

Mike: But the Australian federal government’s strategy, as it were, is to create a nature repair market to do that. And this is a pretty confusing topic, I think even for those of us who live here. So can you talk about this nature repair market, which I understand has not launched? What is it and how is this going to help us achieve more land protection?

Euan: So the nature repair market is basically the government trying to say that they simply can’t afford to spend what’s required to protect and recover the environment, and they are trying to instead leverage large amounts of finance from industry and including, of course, polluters that are causing some of the damage, habitat destruction and so forth, in the first place. The problem is that biodiversity is really complex. So to measure biodiversity outcomes is far harder than measuring how much carbon has been stored. So there are carbon markets that already exist and have existed for a long time. Biodiversity, of course, is a much more complex situation compared to measuring an element, essentially. And people have discussed this already for many years, saying that these nature repair markets focused on biodiversity are highly unlikely to be achieved in many cases because they are so complex to navigate. And of course, companies and industry will want a return on investment, and we’re not even really sure what that return on investment would look like. And so we’re placing a huge amount of faith in, in some cases, the very industries that have caused the environmental harm that we’re now having to deal with, somehow coming to the rescue of biodiversity, but not really knowing how we’re going to measure it, not really knowing how people are going to be accountable. And bear in mind that the carbon market itself has been notorious for many scandals and cases where what has been basically paid for has not really been delivered. So as an example, claiming carbon credits for forests that already exist or forests that were planted, but now all the trees are already dead. There are cases of those markets actually having really questionable governance. And so you can imagine how difficult that’s going to be with a biodiversity market. But more importantly than that, I think the government’s basically trying to absolve itself of responsibility. They have a legal requirement that when species are listed, they’re supposed to make recovery plans, they’re supposed to implement those recovery plans, they’re supposed to be funded to do that, and they’re simply failing in many cases to even make recovery plans, let alone put them in place and fund them properly. And it’s hard to argue that we can put all this faith in a nature repair market when, at the same time, we’re spending tens of billions of dollars subsidizing fossil fuels. The Australian pact with the U.K. and the U.S., known as AUKUS, is expected to cost more than $360 billion Australian. And yet, apparently, we can’t find 1% of the annual budget in Australia, which is roughly $7 billion per year, which would be a step change for conservation in Australia. And there’s even research that suggests that it actually would be cheaper and more effective for government to fund this recovery directly than to try and construct a market that has all these problems, is likely to fail, might be open to corruption, and we’ve already seen so far has failed to launch.

Mike: Conservation science and environmental policy experts the world over seem to largely agree that biodiversity markets lack sufficient evidence of succeeding at their purported task, and directly funding conservation is more efficient and effective. I found reports from researchers such as Megan Evans at the University of New South Wales and Yung En Chee from the University of Melbourne, both of whom point to a lack of evidence that biodiversity markets help protect biodiversity. Evans has commented that at best they lock in existing environmental decline. I’ve placed a link in the show notes from the Australia Institute. You can also listen to my previous conversation on the newscast with Yung En Chee regarding biodiversity offsets. A link will be in the show notes for that. What’s very striking to me in all of this, though, is that a study from the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, supported by 60 experts from a couple of years ago, found that Australia’s threatened species could be saved and the environment could largely be protected for just 0.3% of Australia’s GDP, which is about $7.3 billion Australian. This is basically the amount of money Euan Ritchie is proposing here, which would be about 1% of the annual budget. And this figure is also supported by the National Environmental Science Program and the Biodiversity Council, so with evidence like this, it’s truly hard to see why a nature repair market is needed at all.

Euan: So it’s incredibly frustrating when we all know that we’re running out of time rapidly. We can’t afford more delays and putting hope in something that may not even eventuate when we have all the expertise we need. We know what the problems are. We just need government to support us to get on the ground and start doing what we need to do to conserve biodiversity. And it’s an investment. This is the other thing that people need to realize. It’s not a cost, it’s an investment. So we think that probably more than 50% of the economy at least is reliant on the environment in some way. It’s likely to be higher than that. So the economy is largely dependent on a healthy and thriving environment, and yet we’re compromising that by what we’re doing to the environment. So if we invest in the environment, we create jobs, it keeps people happier, healthier, and it has a whole range of other benefits. So it really is a very savvy investment for government to fund directly. It’s a public good, like education and like other key areas that governments invest in.

Mike: So it looks like, and I think I’m referencing the current budget, that Labor allocated $36.9 million in the budget for the Nature Repair Market. Is there a timeline? Is there some kind of a deadline for when this nature repair market has to be launched?

Euan: No, this is the problem. So they’re trying to get this market up and running, and there’s been a lot of discussion, and some people have been really enthusiastic about this market despite all the many criticisms that have been made about what will likely happen with this market. So again, we’re placing huge amounts of hope in a market that may not actually eventuate, or even if it does, it may not be as effective as we would like it to be, and it might be open to a whole range of problems. When instead, we could just fund directly through the government on-ground environmental actions that we know will work. And importantly too, we can target them to the right areas. So we know that we have certain species, certain ecosystems that need probably more help than others in some cases, and so we could strategically target resources to those areas and species that need it most. We’re unlikely to get that with a nature repair market because people are going to choose what they want to do, not necessarily in line with what national or regional priorities might be. And that’s a real problem as well. And another thing too is that we’re worried that, prior to the environmental laws finally passing the Senate late last year, there was a promise that environmental offsets wouldn’t be able to be used as part of this market, but now the government is allowing that. So basically, we’re really worried that people are going to get credit through this market for environmental destruction. And we all know the problems, of course, with environmental offsets, which are well reported.

Mike: Yeah, so this is the thing I think that people, I want to spend just a little bit of time talking about offsets. Hypothetically speaking, would it be possible for, let’s say, an industry to kill off a species in one location and say, “Oops, sorry. Let’s go ahead and protect some different species somewhere else”?

Euan: Killing off an entire species is probably highly unlikely to be approved, but we are basically doing that by default. And one of the problems is that under the current legislation that’s been approved on the national environmental standards that are part of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, it doesn’t take into account cumulative impacts. 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. So it is literally death by a thousand cuts. And so yes, you could have a scenario where a company has destroyed habitat of a species or multiple species, but is contributing to some sort of conservation outcome somewhere else, and so it gets a credit for that under this system. And so that’s deeply problematic. We already have large numbers of species that have very fragmented distributions, small populations, and are very much on their trajectory towards extinction. We don’t want to be facilitating more of that. And I think again, that’s where having government funding conservation directly in a strategic way is likely to be far more effective than this kind of scattergun approach of lots and lots of different individual projects trying to seek credits under this nature repair market system, but not in a systematic or strategic way.

Mike: Hello, listeners, and thank you for tuning in. If you’d like to reference any of the studies mentioned in this conversation, please see the article summary at mongabay.com or find them in the show notes of this episode. For more information on biodiversity markets in Australia, you can listen to my conversation with Yung En Chee, which is also in the show notes of this episode. So as I understand it, the EPBC reform bill was passed in December 2025, and we’re halfway through, almost halfway through, 2026. How’s it going? How are the reforms in this bill playing out in your view?

Euan: Yeah, it’s a mixed bag. Obviously, people were happy that the environmental law reforms passed late last year because they had been used as a political football by both the Labor and Liberal-National Coalition, so both sides of politics, if you like. And the environment has been the loser all the way along because of that. The issue, though, that still is there is that those laws were passed without the national environmental standards being in place, and they are fundamental to the EPBC working and the Environmental Protection Agency also working. So the Environmental Protection Agency will be this body that assesses proposals for developments against, is this going to pose a risk to threatened species, threatened ecosystems and other, what we call, matters of national environmental significance?

Mike: So in the United States, people are probably familiar with the EPA, or the Environmental Protection Agency, which is a federal agency that’s tasked with enforcing environmental laws and standards on a national level. It’s been around since the 1970s. Australia has never had a similar body until the passage of the EPBC reforms this past December, creating what is called Environment Protection Australia, which is essentially Australia’s version of the EPA. Instead, it has relied on state EPA bodies. Western Australia and Victoria have had their own since the 1970s, but New South Wales and South Australia didn’t until the 1990s, just as an example.

Euan: So things that are really significant environmentally speaking, they’ll evaluate against those. It’s very hard to do that when you don’t have really strong and clear national environmental standards in place. So what is deemed acceptable, what is not deemed acceptable in terms of the environment? And unfortunately, there’s currently a review of those standards, and it’s open for public comment. But what’s been put forward so far by the government, a lot of the wording is very weak. It’s not very clear, and it would be very easy for development to proceed under the current laws that are proposed. So in many cases, a lot of environmental scientists and conservation scientists actually think we’ve gone backwards with these laws, which is pretty gut-wrenching when you consider where we already are. And we had a fairly scathing assessment done by Professor Graeme Samuel and scores of conservation and environmental experts. They had more than 30 recommendations as part of that review, and many of those recommendations are simply not going to be met. So it is true to say that, unfortunately, the environmental laws that are being put forward are far too weak, given what we know Australia is facing. And we’re really worried that it’s just going to be more of the same. And I think related to that too, there’s been a lot of rhetoric from the environment minister, Murray Watt, about approvals rather than assessments. And I think language is important. So when you hear the environment minister talking about laws that aid approvals, yes, of course we need to have development, we need houses, we know we have a housing problem in Australia, but we also have to have lines in the sand where we say, “Actually, we can’t just keep destroying habitat and expect to have good outcomes for Australia’s wildlife and ecosystems.” And so there is real concern that development, be it housing, but also critical minerals and the fossil fuel industry, is really going to be placed much higher than the conservation of Australia’s extraordinary, remarkable, and largely unique biodiversity.

Mike: Now, from what I understand, another big complaint was that the Environmental Protection Agency was supposed to have essentially the power to shut down approvals regardless of whoever says things, and that’s not the case. I believe that whoever is the minister can override the decision of the Environmental Protection Agency. Is that correct?

Euan: That’s correct. What many of us were pushing for was an environmental protection agency that genuinely had teeth, so they could look at the proposal, assess that against the national environmental standards, and the threats that it might pose to biodiversity and say, “Look, this is just not in line with that. We can’t approve this,” and they would have the final say. The minister has what we call call-in powers, so they can decide in the national interest that they will essentially make a decision in favor of the development because it’s deemed in the national interest. So that might make sense, as an example, where you might have storm recovery, so you might have a severe storm and you have to go in and do certain actions to recover from a storm. We accept that there are some cases where having call-in powers for the minister are really important. But we are concerned about other cases where, as an example, you could imagine that the minister might say, “We need critical minerals to advance development of certain technologies and so forth, and those critical minerals are also in an area that are overlapping threatened species and ecosystems. In the national interest, we’re going to override the EPBC Act, and we’re going to approve that development.” So we’re really concerned that the EPA is largely going to be a rubber stamp exercise, and probably not going to be the strong, independent authority that we hoped it would be.

Mike: Now, as you’ve already outlined, Australia is a wealthy country. There are resources to go around, but we seemingly give away a lot of them royalty-free. We know there was recent public demand to tax gas exports at 25%, which would generate $17 billion a year, which is quite a lot of money. But Prime Minister Albanese has decided not to do this despite the fact that there appeared to be pretty large public support for it, as well as large public support for nature protection. What do you make of that situation? What do you think would change the opinion of our federal government on this?

Euan: It’s really hard to understand why Prime Minister Albanese did not introduce those taxes. So we look at, of course, a country like Norway and their sovereign wealth fund and just how extraordinarily they’re benefiting from those taxes that they brought in. And we’re not doing that. So 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, to Japan to then on-sell, in one case. It just doesn’t seem to make sense. And so it’s incredibly disappointing. And when we consider that surveys by the Biodiversity Council show that 96% of Australians want more action on the environment, more care for the environment, and more than three-quarters of Australians want at least 1% of Australia’s annual budget going towards doing that, essentially the federal government is ignoring a majority of Australians by not doing that. And large numbers of people, as you said, also want this tax on our gas, including from the fossil fuel industry, including representatives from the fossil fuel industry saying that they should do this. It’s quite rare when you have so many people across different organizations and industries saying, “Yes, this tax makes sense.” So it is really hard to understand why that’s not happening. I think this is really not something for me to delve into, but I think there are conversations to be had about political donations. Both the Coalition and the Labor Party are funded through political donations by interests within coal and gas and other areas of that industry. So there’s a question there around the influence that has on decision-making. Governments, of course, should be acting on behalf of Australians and the best interests of all Australians, not just business. And so I think there’s questions around that. But I think beyond attaining that large amount of money from taxing higher rates of our resources that we’re giving away, we can still afford to fund nature conservation to a much larger degree today. Australia is a sovereign nation. It’s really rich. If we want to fund something that we think is really important, the government could literally do that today. And we even saw that during COVID, of course, with the temporary introduction of essentially what was a universal basic income for people who couldn’t work because of COVID lockdowns. So we know that government can do these things. It’s just a case of whether they have the political appetite to do that, and it’s very hard to understand why they don’t in this case, because as I said, representative samples across Australia from the Biodiversity Council show that Australians want this, overwhelmingly so.

Mike: So Euan, if you had a wish list, let’s say, of the things that you think the Australian federal government should do right now to turn the tide for the environment and in turn us, what would be your top priorities that you think they should focus on?

Euan: I think first and foremost, we need at least 1% of the federal budget to go towards funding conservation and recovery of the environment. So as I said a lot in this interview, we have the expertise. What we don’t have is the support to get on with the job. So we really need that. We do really need stronger environmental laws. It’s no good having nice statements in public and rhetoric if, at the same time, you’re undermining conservation. So you can’t talk about wanting to have no new extinctions when, as an example, the production of Tasmanian salmon was prioritized over the conservation of Maugean skate, which is an endangered species. And that was against the wishes of the own department’s advice. So we need to have honest conversations about what’s being said in a political sense versus what is occurring with action. So we do need those stronger environmental laws. And I just think we need much greater recognition that this is a public good. It’s not a cost. We often hear, “We can’t afford to spend money on the environment because it’ll cost jobs or it’s going to cost too much money.” But it’s being framed the wrong way. It’s an investment in a public good that pays back many times over, both financially, but also socially and culturally. And of course, a big part of that is First Nations peoples, which of course I’m not one and I can’t comment on that in detail, but we should be respecting the wishes of First Nations peoples, which have a deep connection with biodiversity and have for many thousands of years, and they need to be included far more in conservation decision-making and actions as well.

Mike: While I have you here, I would like your opinion on native forest logging because, as I understand it, at least here in New South Wales, it actually costs the state money to do it. It’s a money sink, but it appears to be continuing anyway. I’ve spoken with David Lindenmayer before, and he’s been studying this for years, and he says that native forest logging is ecologically and economically unsustainable. What are your thoughts on native forest logging in Australia?

Euan: Yeah. So I’m not the expert that Professor David Lindenmayer is, but it’s true to say also in Victoria that the industry was running at a loss, and that was being basically subsidized by taxpayers. And in Victoria, they are moving towards, of course, closing the entire native forest industry. I think we need to be clear about what type of forest is being logged for timber. If we’re talking about established and old-growth forests, yes, it’s true to say that’s unsustainable because we’ve already cleared huge amounts of forests around Australia. So the state that I live in, Victoria, is the most cleared state in Australia by area, in terms of proportion of area. So we can’t afford to lose more. If we’re talking about areas of regrowth, potentially we could have sustainable harvests in some of those areas. But I think we need to be clear about which areas are being still logged and cleared. And in many cases, including New South Wales, the Northern Territory, where large amounts of savanna are being cleared and more are planned to be cleared for development, Queensland. So there are still large areas where our forests and our woodlands as well are in really good condition but face a really uncertain future because of weak environmental laws, but also the government still committing to destroying those habitats for development or, in some cases, to produce wood.

Mike: And so just circling this back around to connect it to the broader international community or perhaps other nations that may look to Australia for a signal on what to do, what do you want the international community to know about the way Australia treats its environment? And what kind of message would you have for other nations that may be looking on as we care for, or lack thereof, our environment?

Euan: Yeah, it’s a really complex one because I think a lot of people would have a perception that Australians really love the environment and they take care of the environment and so forth. And it’s true, when you survey Australians, they do care for the environment, and the Biodiversity Council survey shows that, but that’s not reflected by government. And I think that’s a really important distinction. Internationally, people still might not really realize just the extent to which Australia is causing environmental harm in a whole range of ways. We’re exporting huge amounts of coal and gas, but we don’t factor those emissions into our own emissions. So we sell it off and ship it overseas and then wave our hands at that responsibility, even though, of course, climate change is a global issue. It’s not a national issue. Rising emissions matter everywhere, not just where they have been produced. And yeah, we’re not investing in the environment. So 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 we have a lot to lose, really special species that we want to conserve. So most people would know about koalas and some of our iconic species, but there are so many other species in Australia that people should be aware of, and we should be doing a much better job to take care of them. 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: Euan, is there any place that you would direct listeners to learn more or find out more about your work?

Euan: So I have my own website, the Applied Ecology and Conservation Research Group, which is pretty easily found in any of your search engines. But I think if people want to find out more just about biodiversity conservation in general, then they could go to the Biodiversity Council’s webpage, which has a lot of really great information about some of the things we’ve discussed today, but also just other facets of wildlife conservation and environmental policy. So they would both be great places to look. And The Conversation too is another great resource for people who might not know about The Conversation, which is an online blog by academics, a news source, and the environment section of that is also fantastic.

Mike: Euan Ritchie, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you.

Euan: My absolute pleasure too. Thank you.

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Previously Published on news.mongabay with Creative Commons Attribution

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