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Ecological decline

By Robert Ellison - posted Tuesday, 29 August 2006


The Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment found that riparian zones are declining over 73 per cent of Australia.

There has been a massive decline in the ranges of indigenous mammals over more than 100 years; in the past 200 years, 22 Australian mammals have become extinct - a third of the world’s recent extinctions. Further decline in ranges is still occurring and is likely to result in more extinctions.

Mammals are declining in 174 of 384 subregions in Australia and rapidly declining in 20. The threats to vascular plants are increasing over much of Australia; threatened birds are declining across 45 per cent of the country with extinctions in arid parts of Western Australia; reptiles are declining across 30 per cent of the country; threatened amphibians are in decline in southeastern Australia and are rapidly declining in the South East Queensland, Brigalow Belt South and Wet Tropics bioregions.

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Our rivers are still carrying huge excesses of sand, mud and silt. Mud and silt washes out onto coastlines destroying seagrass and corals. The sand chokes up pools and riffles and fills billabongs putting intense pressure on inland, aquatic ecologies.

In 1992, the Mary River in southeast Queensland flooded carrying millions of tonnes of mud into Hervey Bay. A thousand square kilometres of seagrass died off decimating dugongs, turtles and fisheries. The seagrass has grown back but the problems of the Mary River have not been fixed. The banks have not been stabilised and the seagrass could be lost again at any time. A huge excess of sand working its way down the river is driving to extinction the Mary River cod and the Mary River turtle.

The situation in the Mary River is mirrored in catchments right across the country. Nationally, 50 per cent of our seagrasses have been lost and it has been this way for at least 20 years.

It is well known what the problems are. The causes of the declines in biodiversity are land clearing, land salinisation, land degradation, habitat fragmentation, overgrazing, exotic weeds, feral animals, rivers that have been pushed past their points of equilibrium and changed fire regimes. The individual solutions are often fairly simple: only when combined do they become daunting.

One of the problems is that the issues are reviewed at a distance. Looking at issues from a national or state perspective is just too complex: even if problems are identified broadly, it is difficult to establish local priorities. Looking at issues from a distance means that a focus on the immediate and fundamental causes of problems is lost.

There are rafts of administration, reports, computer models, guidelines and plans but the only on ground restoration and conservation is done by volunteers and farmers. Volunteers are valiantly struggling but it is too little too late. Farmers tend to look at their own properties, understandably, and not at the whole landscape.

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Our existing environmental legislation deals exclusively with development and farming. In Australia, the entire urban footprint is 0.3 per cent of the continent. Land clearing in Queensland was 0.15 per cent of the state a year. With the relatively small areas involved, urban development and land clearing cannot be the main cause of continuing ecological decline in Australia.

Billions of dollars are expended by governments regulating farming and development. Billions more are spent by councils and the private sector. The ecological decline continues because we are focused on development and farming and substantially neglect restoration of landscapes. It would be preferable if business and farmers, with the support of countless consultants and modern environmental management methods, were left to their own devices to a large extent and public resources focused on the bigger picture.

There are solutions to some or all of our environmental problems: scientifically based sustainable grazing and agriculture; replanting and stabilising riparian zones; restoring fragmented habitat; applying appropriate fire regimes; and controlling feral species. But first of all it needs political will and a financial commitment.

The 2000 Repairing the Country: a National Scenario for Strategic Investment report estimated the cost of repairing the Australian landscape would be $65 billion over a 10-year period and that a public investment of $37 billion was needed, matched by private investment of $28 billion. The total expenditure on environmental services in 1996-97 from all public sources was $2 billion for programs that are manifestly failing to reverse the decline in biodiversity.

In Queensland, the central organising environmental legislation is the Integrated Planning Act. It specifies a number of activities that trigger assessment under other environmental legislation. The associated environmental legislation is the Environmental Protection Act, the Fisheries Act, the Vegetation Management Act, the Coastal Protection and Management Act and the Water Act.

The Integrated Planning Act is possibly a perfectly adequate vehicle for town planning, roads, water, building and structural certification, sewerage, storage of flammable materials and a host of other traditional activities.

The Environmental Protection Act applies to industry and development. Its main concern is emissions of noise and air and water pollutants. The main outcome is a host of “end of the pipe” limits on emissions.

The Fisheries Act protects marine vegetation and approves structures in marine waters. The Vegetation Management Act rules on clearing of native vegetation. The Coastal Protection and Management Act at least theoretically addresses sustainable development of the coastline. In practice, it approves development in the coastal zone. It applies to very limited areas of the coastline with the bulk left to weeds, 4WD’s, goats, pigs and cats. The Water Act applies to diversion of water resources.

Laudable as the goals of any single piece of environmental legislation may be, the larger picture is not addressed in a manner that integrates science, society and the economy and at the same time provides for conservation and restoration of our landscapes. The legislation applies to part of the problem but leaves huge gaps where the decline of ecological systems continues unabated.

Next generation environmental approvals are needed to save money and to redirect those resources into achieving better environmental outcomes.

In Queensland, the way forward must be to exclude the environmental legislation from the Integrated Planning Act and reassign staff from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Primary Industries, the Department of Natural Resources and Mines and Parks and Wildlife into interacting teams of environmental scientists working at a local scale.

Environmental science is a new type of team-based science drawing on a range of skills - ecology, archaeology, sociology, engineering, economics, accountants, environmental law and ethics, town planning and others. Use these powerful teams to drive solutions to local problems on a broad front.

Keep the environmental triggers in the Integrated Planning Act by all means by making them notifiable activities. Subject activities to integrated assessment but make compliance voluntary and enforced by contract. This would streamline processes tremendously and allow people to get on with higher priority and broader environmental conservation goals. If agreement can’t be reached, refer it to the political sphere where decisions should always have been. Provide for statutory timeframes. Keep criminal sanctions for proved environmental harm.

There are three elements to sustainability, the welfare of current and future generations and the conservation of biodiversity on which all life ultimately depends. For one objective measure of sustainability, the unfortunate truth is that the trend to declining biological diversity has not been reversed over the past 20 or more years. The urgency of now doing so should be apparent to everyone.

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First published in the Journal of the Environmental Engineering Society, Engineers Australia.



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About the Author

Robert Ellison has a Bachelor Degree in Civil Engineering and a Masters in Environmental Science from the University of Wollongong. He has been an environmental activist for many years.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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