Leading Australian scientists have accused the Albanese government of offering “grossly inadequate” funding to stop environmental decline, and warned that failing to protect nature would lead to “an existential threat greater than inflation”.
The Biodiversity Council, an independent research hub, said the limited funding for environment programs announced this week suggested that environment minister Tanya Plibersek’s promised target of ending species extinctions in the country was “still hollow”.
The council applauded the government’s promise of $121m over four years to create a natural Environment Protection Agency, but said the budget failed to provide the funding boost needed to protect and recover threatened species and ecosystems.
A five-year government review released last year found the health of Australia’s environment was poor and deteriorating, in part due to a lack of funding. Launching the state of the environment report, Plibersek said the environment would be “back on the priority list” under Labor after funding cuts and neglect under the Coalition.
Prof Hugh Possingham, a co-chief councillor at the Biodiversity Council and Queensland’s former chief scientist, said it was too early to judge the government’s performance, but urgent action was needed.
He said it would have major consequences for the economy, human health, agriculture and clean air and water if the country continued to run down its natural capital. “Underfunding the care of the environment is an existential threat far greater than inflation,” he said.
Possingham said the environment was important for people’s health and wellbeing and about half of Australia’s gross domestic product relied on natural systems. An assessment of 40,000 datasets had found Australia’s threatened species had been declining at a rate of about 2% a year since the turn of the millennium.
“If everybody’s superannuation had been declining at 2% a year, every year since 2000, what would we think? If the Sydney Opera House had been disappearing at 2% a year, what would we think?” he said. “There seems to be this disconnect between what we tolerate for economic and social outcomes and what we tolerate for nature.”
Australia has about 1,900 species and ecosystems that are listed as threatened. Peer-reviewed studies have found 19 ecosystems are showing signs of collapse.
Prof Brendan Wintle, an ecologist at the University of Melbourne and a Biodiversity Council member, estimated the country needed to boost spending on environment programs by about six times to prevent extinctions and halt other declines. “For just 10% of the stage-three tax cuts we could recover every one of Australia’s almost 2,000 threatened species,” he said.
The environment budget included $262m for degraded national parks, $163m for the Australian Institute of Marine Science and $45m to restore important sites in Sydney Harbour.
In response to the scientists, Plibersek said the government was investing a record amount into the environment, including $224.5m for a saving native species program and $231.5m to establish 10 new Indigenous protected areas.
“And this budget includes almost $440m of new money through the Natural Heritage Trust for programs to conserve threatened species and ecosystems and restore Ramsar wetlands,” she said.
Plibersek said protecting threatened species required action across government, including rewriting environmental laws and the introduction of an EPA and Environment Information Australia, a separate new body promised to improve knowledge about threatened species. Legislation has been promised later this year.
The chief conservation officer with World Wildlife Fund Australia, Rachel Lowry, said those commitments were welcome but in reality there appeared to be little-to-no new money for on-ground conservation compared with previous budgets.
She said the government had renewed the existing Natural Heritage Trust program, which did not increase the overall pool of funding and the national parks funding was a “trifling” amount spread over four years and mostly earmarked for infrastructure upgrades.
“There is nothing new for critical on-the-ground conservation efforts and certainly not the major increase that is needed to halt and reverse rapid biodiversity loss,” Lowry said.
First coalmine approval
Plibersek drew criticism after indicating a new coalmine would receive federal approval for the first time since the Albanese government was elected a year ago.
The proposed Isaac River mine development in central Queensland is relatively small, expected to yield up to 500,000 tonnes of coal a year for up to five years. It would produce metallurgical coal, used in steel-making, which is considered harder to immediately replace with clean alternatives than thermal coal, used in electricity generation.
Gavan McFadzean, of the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the decision “flew in the face of the accepted science on global warming” as climate scientists had been “crystal clear for years that we must immediately stop digging up and burning coal if we want a safe climate”.
A spokesperson for Plibersek said the government had to “make decisions in accordance with the facts and the national environment law – that’s what happens on every project, and that’s what’s happened here”.
The company developing the mine, Bowen Coking Coal, has to submit a plan to offset the “significant impact” on the ornamental snake, a vulnerable species expected to lose up to 25 hectares of its habitat.
