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SBS acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of Country and their connections and continuous care for the skies, lands and waterways across Australia.
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You're listening to Australia Explained, an SBS audio podcast helping you navigate life in Australia.
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Australia is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, home to wildlife and plant species found nowhere else on the planet, but it also needs our protection.
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There's a saying in the desert, If country is healthy, people are healthy. Many plants and animals live nowhere else in the world, and we understand how delicate that balance is.
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We know that mammal loss is a big issue, but
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only now starting to realise how massive the extinction crisis has been for a number of plants that have been wiped out that we never even saw.
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Welcome to Australia Explained. I'm your host Melissa Compagnoni. Today we discover what makes Australia's biodiversity so special, the threats it faces, and how we can all help to protect it.
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As an island continent, Australia's long isolation has shaped an extraordinary natural world, with biodiversity found nowhere else on Earth. Yet this remarkable environment is under pressure. More than 2000 species of mammals, birds and invertebrates are at risk of extinction, and Australia already has the worst record in the world for mammal extinction.
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There are many pressures affecting Australia's wildlife and plant life, but there are also practical ways people can help protect this unique biodiversity.
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Professor Hugh Possingham, co-chair of the Biodiversity Council and BirdLife Australia Vice President, says Australia's plants and animals are among the most distinctive on the planet.
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And it's partly because Australia has been an isolated continent for a very long time. It broke away from other continents over 50 million years ago, for example, a lot of our
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marsupials, koalas, kangaroos, wombats, numbats, and then things like egg laying mammals, the monotremes, the platypus and the echidna aren't found anywhere else in the world.
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Yilka/Ngaanyatjarra/Narrunga woman Jade Bromilow from the Indigenous Desert Alliance explains that for Australia's First Nations people, country is far more than land.
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It's family, culture and identity.
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Country holds our stories, our dreaming, our ancestors, and these responsibilities are really important to carry on. We have the obligations to look after the plants and animals the right way. They're a part of our food systems, our totems, our dreaming tjukurrpa stories, and our teachings that we will then teach on to the next generation.
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Australia's First Nations people have lived alongside these species for tens of thousands of years, developing deep knowledge of the land and its rhythms.
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We understand the patterns when they move, when they breed, and when they're thriving and when something's not right. So when we talk about wildlife and flora being special, it's not just because it's unique, it's a part of who we are as Indigenous people.
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Professor Possingham says conserving Australia's unique biodiversity is important not only for the wildlife and plant species we live amongst, but for the health and prosperity of all Australians.
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Healthy ecosystems, forests, lakes, grasslands, these are the things that provide services for humanity. They provide
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clean air, they mitigate against climate change and they underpin some of our major industries, for example, tourism and agriculture. If we lose species, unfortunately the functioning of those ecosystems starts to decline, so the benefits and the services they provide to us as people also decline.
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One of Australia's threatened wildlife species is the great desert skink, which is of cultural significance to indigenous people, as Jade explains,
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The great desert skink, or Tjakura, it's a small orange lizard that lives underground in a family burrow system, and what's beautiful about the Tjakura is that they live together with multiple generations, sharing the same burrow and looking after one another, and this kind of reflects how we in Indigenous.
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communities value our family, our community, and caring for Country.
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When species disappear, Jade says it's not only an environmental loss, it's a cultural loss too.
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The knowledge connected to those species will fade. The stories, the practises, and the relationships will weaken. There's a saying in the desert, If Country is healthy, people are healthy. Many plants and animals live nowhere else in the world, and we understand how delicate that balance is.
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Australia is experiencing a severe biodiversity crisis, including having the highest rate of mammal extinctions in the world, driven by the impact of invasive predators such as foxes and feral cats, habitat destruction and climate change, as Professor Possingham explains.
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Australia probably has over half a million different species, many of which have never yet
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been described, but of the ones we know well, we know that 2000 are threatened with extinction. And in fact, sadly, since industrialisation over the last 250 years, Australia has been losing species at more than 100 times what would be considered a normal rate. Indeed, if we don't stop extinctions, we could lose almost half our species in the next 200 or 300 years.
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Keith Bradby is the head of Gondwana Link Limited, a Western Australian conservation organisation working to reconnect more than 1000 kilometres of habitat in the state's south west.
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It's a tragedy that my kids can't camp out like the old fellows I've talked to and have a ring of eyes around their campfire from the abundance of wildlife we once had.
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We know that mammal loss is a big issue, but we're only now starting to realise how massive the extinction crisis has been for a number of plants that have been wiped out that we never even saw.
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Professor Possingham says three major threats are driving biodiversity loss in Australia, beginning with the destruction
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of habitat for urban development and agriculture.
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Species, if they lose their habitats, their populations decline and they head slowly towards extinction. The second biggest cause of extinction in Australia has been invasive species, so we introduced foxes, cats, deer, many, many invasive weed species, and some diseases.
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Climate change is also an emerging threat to Australia's biodiversity.
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Many species will not be able to adapt to the increased temperatures and also the increased catastrophic events like fire and flood and possibly cyclone.
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As Mr Bradby explains, the fragmentation of habitat combined with the impact of other threatening processes is placing many Australian wildlife and plant species in peril.
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We keep talking about threats to our wildlife, but what we're really dealing with right now are immediate assaults. We've taken this great interconnected ecosystem and put it into tiny little
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pockets that we call reserves and don't manage. The fundamental assault is that we've stopped the ability of most wildlife and habitats to interact, and that takes away their resilience to change at the very time when the climate is changing, but it's fundamentally we've broken up the system into little bits and it's not meant to work as little bits.
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But we can all help protect Australia's wildlife and plants, Professor Possingham says.
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You may decide to join a conservation group, a local group in your local area, and even in your own garden you can plant native trees and shrubs anywhere where there's a
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gap. And once you've informed yourself about what a tragic loss all these extinctions will be to the culture and the health of Australians, is to talk to a local politician and just air your concerns about the loss of Australia's flora and fauna.
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Whether through local community groups or environmental not for profit organisations, there are many ways people can get involved in conservation, as Mr Bradby explains.
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Our program is fundamentally about achieving massive improvement in ecological health at a very large scale, but massive changes like that are only made up of lots of small changes
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that happen reasonably cohesively. And each of those small changes has to be driven by individuals or groups of individuals, be it the person with a 5-acre block who can welcome wildlife back to their properties or the group of investors who can put meaningful money to make change at scale. Every one of us can find something that makes a difference.
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Jade says everyone shares responsibility for caring for the Country where they live.
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It can start with something as simple as learning whose Country you're on and listening to and respecting local knowledge.
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You can support Indigenous-led conservation work and a range of programs, and when communities are coming together and they're listening, learning and taking responsibility, we're protecting the place that we all feel is special, and it's important for not just Indigenous people, but everyone in Australia that if we look after Country, the Country will look after us.
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Thanks for listening to this episode of Australia Explained, written and produced by Phil Tucak and mixed by me, Melissa Compagnoni. Australia Explained managing editor is Roza Germian.
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This was an SBS audio podcast. For more Australia Explained stories, visit SBS.com.au/Australiaexplained.
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Subscribe or follow the Australia Explained podcast for more valuable information and tips about settling into your new life in Australia. Do you have any questions or topic ideas? Send us an email to australiaexplained@ sbs.com.au.
