Conservationists have accused Adani of breaching its legal obligation to protect the black-throated finch displaced by the clearing or impact of 16,000 hectares of its habitat near the Carmichael coalmine, after obtaining draft documents about the species’ management.
BirdLife Australia’s Stephanie Todd said Adani’s proposed new management plan for the endangered finch – obtained under Queensland’s Right to Information laws – shows Adani had “sidelined” independent scientists with whom the mining company is required to consult.
Todd also accused the state’s environment department of not enforcing Adani’s obligation to work with the black-throated finch recovery team, which she said rendered its stated commitment to doing so as “lip service”.
She said the existing management plan was already “grossly inadequate” – an assertion based on an independent scientific panel the Queensland government commissioned, mostly ignored, and then tried to keep secret.
But the James Cook University researcher said the fact that a new plan containing several “red flags” was drafted without the input of the recovery team demonstrated a failure of post-approval environmental regulation.
“It’s just become a box-checking exercise – and they are not even checking all the boxes,” Todd said.
Adani, now operating as Bravus, responded to questions from Guardian Australia with a statement declaring it “fully compliant with its commitments” to protect local black-throated finch populations.
“These unfounded allegations are the latest in a misinformation campaign that opponents of the mine have been running for many years,” a spokesperson said.
Queensland’s Department of Environment and Science responded with a statement also denying Adani had breached its obligations towards the finch and strongly rejecting suggestions it had enabled the company to do so.
Essentially, the dispute comes down to what is meant by the requirement to consult.
Environmental approvals commit Adani to a management plan for the black-throated finch on its mine site and a 33,000 hectare conservation area meant to offset its destruction of the finch’s habitat.
“All revisions of the survey and monitoring program must be carried out in consultation with the BTF recovery team,” Adani’s environmental authority reads.
But Adani has drafted a new management plan which, if approved, would change its survey and monitoring methodology, and flagged those changes with the environment department mid-last year.
Adani said it was obliged to consult with the department on updates to the management plan.
“This is precisely what Bravus is doing as the first step, and other stakeholders will be consulted in due course as required,” Adani said.
The department said in a statement that it would ensure “Bravus can demonstrate that it has consulted” with the recovery team before it approved and revisions to survey or monitoring programs.
But the recovery team’s chair, Dr April Reside, said the first she was made aware of the proposed new methods was through BirdLife’s Right to Information request – and that she was still waiting for consultation.
Todd, who also works with the recovery team, said that if Adani was serious about consultation it would have been discussing its proposed changes with Reside and her colleagues well before taking them to the department last July.
If the mining company had done so, the scientists would have raised serious concerns.
They are concerned that proposed changes to monitoring methodology would be unable to pick up “catastrophic population declines”.
Todd said that a decline of up to 80% could occur on the mine site before on Adani’s surveyors noticed the difference.
“That would probably see it uplisted to critically endangered and, yeah, they don’t have a good chance of surviving from there,” Todd said.
Adani’s environmental monitors would also spend less time observing the water holes from which finches drink.
Rather than the six hours specifically required by a land court ruling in 2015, monitoring would take place over three.
Reside said if the mining company had data which supported scaling back monitoring, she would “love to see it”.
“That would be so helpful to our monitoring programs,” she said.
“If that’s true, great, let us know, we’re dying to see it.”
This, according to the researchers, is another front on which Adani is not meeting the obligations of its environmental approval.
These commit the company to “sharing the findings” of its research with the recovery team.
The black-throated finch’s national recovery plan is to sunset this month. Reside, who is authoring the updated plan, says she has not received any data from Adani to help inform that plan.
Adani insists upon legally binding data-sharing agreements before it will share this data, and the recovery team says it does not have the resources to do so.
Reside said this stalemate and Adani’s sidelining of her recovery team comes at a time at which mounting evidence showed regulation to protect threatened species was failing.
“There’s lots of evidence that the failure to regulate impacts is a really important part of this,” she said.
“The black-throated finch is just one of many examples.”
