Deforestation in Australia Summary
Most deforestation is for beef pasture development and is concentrated in central and south central Queensland and north central NSW in the Brigalow Belt and Mulga Lands bioregions. Mining, infrastructure, and urban development combined account for only 1%.
However, unlike in rural areas, the harm to animals is ongoing particularly in urban and peri-urban environments where past clearing has resulted in native bushland fragments embedded in a landscape with multiple hazards for wildlife. Animals in fragmented landscapes face inadequate shelter, nesting and food resources, exposure to the elements causing dehydration and starvation, as well as increased human wildlife conflict, domestic cat and dog attacks, collisions with powerlines, structures or vehicles on busy roads and stress-induced diseases.
Deforestation in Qld and NSW has resulted in an average of 100 million animals within the clearing footprint. This includes 1.9 to 4.5 million mammals, 7.4 to 9.3 million birds and over 96 million reptiles of all sizes being injured, killed, or displaced every year on average.
This includes approximately 1,200 Koalas a year on average. Koalas were listed as endangered in 2022 after suffering a rapid decline in Qld and NSW in recent decades due to deforestation, habitat fragmentation and the ongoing death and injury that results from fragmentation particularly in urban and peri-urban environments.
In Queensland, on average 24,000 native animals every year are recorded by RSPCA Qld as being rescued or admitted into care, including over 500 koalas. Most admissions fall in the densely populated southeast of the state where wildlife hospitals are concentrated, but which is no longer where most deforestation happens. Numbers injured or killed directly due to deforestation in southeast Queensland are small. The bulk of rescues are the legacy of past deforestation resulting in fragmentation of native bushland in the urban and peri-urban environment.
Little has improved for wild animals since our last report on this crisis in 2017. Despite some reforms to the Vegetation Management Act in Queensland in 2018, laws and policies in both states have not greatly changed and still allow very large areas of bushland habitat for wildlife to be destroyed every year, likely harming, injuring, and killing millions of native animals every year.
Deforestation Legislative changes required
Reducing the toll of suffering and death that results from habitat destruction and fragmentation requires major changes in policy:
- To prohibit or prevent most bushland habitat destruction, especially in areas that remain largely unfragmented;
- To support research to better quantify and understand the impacts of deforestation on forest dependent wildlife, including directly and indirectly impacted individuals;
- To mitigate welfare impacts of any bushland destruction that is allowed through pre-clearing surveys and rehoming of displaced animals;
- To ensure destroyed habitat areas are replaced or offset by restored habitat of the same type and quality;
- To take steps in already developed areas to reduce the ongoing hazards to wildlife from human activities by, for example, establishing wildlife corridors between fragmented areas of previously intact habitat, wildlife bridges over roadways, and stronger controls over human activities within wild habitats;
- To enhance public education about the impacts of deforestation on native animal welfare; and
- To support collaborations between veterinarians, wildlife rescue and conservation organisations, focussing on areas with heavy current deforestation rates or high potential future deforestation risk.
https://www.greenpeace.org.au/greenpeace-reports/deforestation-animal-welfare-crisis/
Next week, diplomats from around the world will descend on Yerevan, Armenia, to negotiate a series of decisions under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
Between 19 and 30 October, 196 parties will gather to hammer out the precise wording of the dozens of legal texts that make up the decisions under the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the CBD.
This year’s summit is particularly significant, as it marks the halfway point between the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the deadline for achieving its targets.
The CBD has found that countries are currently not on track to meet 22 out of the framework’s 23 targets.
During the fortnight, delegates will also be negotiating decisions relating to the two supplemental protocols to the CBD: the Cartagena Protocol, which covers biosafety; and the Nagoya Protocol, which covers access and benefit-sharing for the use of genetic resources.
(The Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols, which are each governed by a “meeting of the parties”, or “MOP”, have fewer parties than the CBD as a whole, with 173 and 141, respectively.)
Carbon Brief is tracking the progress of countries towards consensus on dozens of negotiating texts using the interactive table below.
The tracker includes texts from the COP, as well as the MOPs for the Cartagena and Nagoya protocols. It also includes draft decisions from the most recent subsidiary body meetings, as these form the starting point for the negotiations in Yerevan.
The CBD has three subsidiary bodies: the subsidiary body on scientific, technical and technological advice (SBSTTA), the subsidiary body on implementation (SBI) and the subsidiary body on article 8(j) and other provisions (SB8J).
SB8J focuses on issues related to the Indigenous peoples and local communities. It was established at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, in 2024.
The first two columns of the interactive tracker list the topic of each agenda item and the relevant body, with subsequent columns including dates, page counts and links to the original documents.
The table is searchable and can be sorted using the arrows in the header.
Areas of disagreement in UN draft texts are denoted by square brackets. Counting the brackets in a particular iteration of a text therefore gives a sense of how far parties are from reaching consensus.
The bracket column is colour-coded, with dark green indicating a low number of brackets and red indicating a high number of brackets remaining.
Texts can also present parties with choices using “options” or alternatives (“alt”), which are counted together in the sixth column of the table.
The key discussions in Yerevan will centre around two agenda items in particular. The first is the global review, which will assess progress towards the GBF and make recommendations for accelerating action.
The second is finance, which can be separated into two parts: resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism. On resource mobilisation, biodiverse global south countries are likely to push for an increased amount of international finance for conservation.
Disagreement over the creation of the financial mechanism led to the suspension of COP16 in Cali in October 2024, as parties failed to find agreement on the mobilisation of finance before the end of the summit.
Global south countries want the establishment of a separate financial mechanism under the control of the CBD; global north countries largely prefer to maintain the existing mechanism, which sits under the Global Environment Facility.
At the resumed session of COP16 in Rome in early 2025, countries agreed on a roadmap that would lead to the establishment of a permanent mechanism.
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The post Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Tracking negotiating texts at the COP17 biodiversity summit
A beacon of love
On an outer island of Fiji, two thousand nautical miles from Sydney, is a shining light of hope and resilience for our troubled world.
The island of Kioa is home to a Tuvaluan community who migrated from their atoll of Vaitupu in the late 1940s. It is a land of warm hearts, big smiles, and deep cultural roots; a place where the sound of a conch still summons the island together, where islanders paddle out to fish in carved outrigger canoes, and healthy happy children walk barefoot to school.
Here, culture is life. Kioans live sustainably through their traditional knowledge and practices. The island is alive with song, dance and the rhythms of a life tied to the tides, the winds, and the seasons.
Facing the future
Greenpeace has been lucky to have a relationship with Kioa for a number of years now, and we are continually learning from this remarkable community.
Last week, as part of our Voyaging Oceania project, we returned to the island. Our purpose was twofold —- to carry messages from the island to leaders gathering in Nadi this week for the Pacific Pre-COP, and to support the Kioa community in their efforts to improve water security for the island.
Unlike Tuvalu itself, with its eight atolls, Kioa is a mountainous, forested and richly fertile island. It will remain habitable far into the future. Kioans did not initially migrate from Vaitupu due to climate change, but the move was prophetic. They now have a lifeboat.
However, even Kioa faces challenges on our rapidly warming planet, in particular when it comes to water. Climate change is shifting once reliable rainfall patterns. On top of this, the island is already feeling the effect of this year’s intensifying El Niño event, which for Fiji means reduced rainfall and prolonged dry spells.
Right now, fresh water has to be carefully rationed, and is only available for a few hours a day. During last week’s visit aboard our campaigning ship Oceania, Greenpeace was privileged to work with the Kioa community on a new solar-powered water distribution project for the island.
Designed and led by the island, the project involves using a solar pump to move water from a reliable source to a storage tank and then using gravity to distribute the water around the village.
It was a lesson in how local knowledge and ingenuity can be the backbone of today’s climate solutions. To build a dam around the source, the local community knew the exact spot where they could gather gravel at low tide to mix with the cement. They took only what was needed, knowing that all resources must be carefully conserved. Kioa has no roads and no machinery, and it was an all-of-island effort to carry the materials up to the project site, including many heavy bags of sand and rock.
Such projects truly bring to life the vision of a resilient, locally-led, fossil fuel free Pacific.