Damning report on Australia's environment

Forest and Bird, Issue 281, 1 August 1996, Page 10

Damning report on Australia's environment

WHILE THEY CAN be thankful for clean water, and relatively low levels of urban air pollut-

ants, sulphur dioxide and acid rain, Australians have no cause to be complacent about the country’s environment, according a recently released govern-ment-commissioned report, State of the Environment 1996. The 600-page document is the first comprehensive and independent report card on how Australians are treating their environment. Compiled over 30 months, it brings together input from more than 100 scientists, headed by an advisory council of representatives from industry, the national research agency CSIRO, universities, indigenous groups and the environmental movement. The results make disturbing reading: » In the two centuries since European settlement, more mammals (18) have become extinct in Australia than in any other country; over the same period, Australia has lost about 75 percent of its rainforests and about 40 percent of its total forest cover. Land is being cleared at a rate of about 6,600 square kilometres a year (most of it in Queensland). With the land clearance has come massive soil erosion, an annual toll of 14 billion tonnes — or about 19 percent

of all the soil lost globally. Some areas of rangeland are so badly degraded they may never recover; others will only recover if exotic grazers are removed. One point made in the report is that land clearance, agricultural modification and other human activity are altering native habitats so extensively that many indigenous species are moving well beyond their natural ranges and turning into pests. These species outside their range, states the report, "may pose as serious a threat to biodiversity as exotic species". One cockatoo for example, the galah — once confined to river systems — has now spread throughout the country due to the greater abundance of water from farm dams and animal troughs, and is competing for nesting sites and destroying the eggs of another native parrot, Carnaby’s cockatoo. The latter has disappeared from a third of its range in the last 25 years.