In Brief
- The lemuroid ringtail possum is one of 34 species that have just been added to Australia's threatened species list.
- Researchers say the scale and pace of man-made climate change has made it nearly impossible for species to adapt to changes.
Australia’s unique wildlife is facing an escalating extinction crisis and researchers say urgent climate action and stronger environmental protections are critical to prevent further irreversible loss of Australia's signature biodiversity.
While Australia is famed around the world for its vast array of unique plants and animals, it also has the highest rate of mammal extinction in the world and the second highest rate of biodiversity loss.
Conservation experts say Australia could lose many of these distinctive species in the near future.
Jess Abrahams, national nature campaigner with the Australian Conservation Foundation, said Australia's wildlife is being sent "to extinction" by climate change and other threats.
"We now have more than 2,300 plants, animals, and ecosystems threatened with extinction in Australia, and the list keeps growing.
"And unless we take some really urgent action to protect these unique plants and animals, our future generations won't be able to enjoy the unique nature that we have grown up with."
Species on the frontline
One animal on the frontline of this battle with a rapidly warming climate is the lemuroid ringtail possum.
The possum, native to north Queensland's Wet Tropics rainforests, is one of 34 species that have just been added to Australia's threatened species list as of February 2026.
Stephen Williams, who recently retired as a professor of biodiversity and climate change at James Cook University, has spent around 35 years studying the creatures.
He said he nominated the lemuroid ringtail possum as an endangered species in 2022 after noticing a rapid decline due to heatwaves and an increase in average temperatures.
"We've already lost about 60 per cent of the population of lemuroid ringtails in the last 15 years. And the predictions are that they're going to be almost extinct or extinct by about 2040 to 2050 kind of range.
"The increasing temperature, just the average temperatures across the whole year, decreases their reproductive biology, stops them breeding as much.
"And so there's sort of a double whammy. They're getting increased mortality and you're also getting decreased births. "
Abrahams said the decades of research gathered by Williams and his team showed the possums were constantly migrating higher and higher in their environment to escape the heat.
"It cannot survive under heatwave conditions, and it must climb higher and higher up the mountains to find cooler environments. But so many of our wildlife that are already living in higher altitude areas, when climate change comes, there's literally nowhere higher to climb. They're literally falling off the top of the mountain."
Williams said he didn't intend on focusing his research on the impacts of climate change but its vast destructive impacts became unavoidable to him as early as 2003.
"I was studying rainforest animals with no intention of working on climate change. We did some analysis which showed that if things continued the way they were going, that about 50 per cent of the species that I worked on would go extinct by the end of this century.
"And that just completely blew my mind and I sort of thought, 'Well, there's not really much point in studying anything else at this stage.'"
Professor James Watson, a conservation researcher from the the University of Queensland, said the length of Williams' research offers a unique look at the threats that many other species are likely experiencing without researchers knowing.
"The fear is obviously that the lemuroid possum is kind of the canary in the coal mine. It's well studied. But there are tons of species that we don't know are actually being affected because they're not being monitored.
"So we suspect there's a massive underestimate on the amount of species actually imperilled by climate change."
What can be done to protect the lemuroid ringtail possum?
Abrahams said adding the possum to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act's threatened species list helps to raise their status to a "matter of national environmental significance" that is protected under Australia's national environment laws.
Australia's federal Environmental Protection Agency is scheduled to begin operations in July after a slate of environmental protection reforms were passed last year, however, Abrahams said the protections under the agency will need to be rigorous.
"There are also new rules and standards under these new laws, and the details of those rules are still being hashed out. But if these rules aren't strong, if they're full of loopholes, well an animal being added to the threatened species list perhaps won't give it the protection that it needs and they will still be at risk from extinction."
'Extreme' changes to climate
Williams said he and his colleagues have spent decades helping the lemuroid ringtail possum and other species adapt, but unless the pace of climate change is slowed by a rapid reduction of carbon emissions in Australia and around the world, their efforts will not amount to much.
"All these adaptation actions that we take in terms of protecting refugia, keeping animals in captivity, moving them around, whatever it is we do, it is still kind of fiddling at the edges a bit.
"It's doing the best we can, but the main thing that needs doing is stopping the temperature going too much higher. We're already at one and a half degrees, which is already a level which all of my analysis over the last 30 years says that the impacts will start to become worse and accelerate rapidly from one and a half degrees on."
Watson said most animals have an inherent ability to adapt to a changing climate, but the scale and pace of man-made climate change has made it nearly impossible for them to keep up with these changes.
He said humans have a duty to safeguard vulnerable animals as best as they can until the Earth can begin to recover from this damage.
"Every species that has evolved on Earth has undergone some kind of pressure from a changing climate simply because the climate is always changing. This climate changing event caused by humans is different. It's more extreme," he said.
"It's going to take hundreds of years for the climate to get back to normal. Even if we stop bad behaviour right now. These species are going to have to go through this kind of climate bottleneck, and we have to allow these species to have the best fighting chance."
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