Not Acts of God or Nature: World is Facing a Biodiversity Crisis

Of the six great mass extinctions
of species on Earth, five involved catastrophic events such as collisions with
huge meteorites, geological upheavals or the arrival of ice ages whose effects
lasted for millennia. The sixth mass extinction is occurring now, but it is the
behaviour of humans rather than nature that has resulted in the loss of
thousands of animal and plant species. And Australia has the worst extinction
record among all developed countries.

Geoff Maslen In The Age August
30, 2011

At risk

OF THE six great mass extinctions
of species on Earth, five involved catastrophic events such as collisions with
huge meteorites, geological upheavals or the arrival of ice ages whose effects
lasted for millennia. The sixth mass extinction is occurring now, but it is the
behaviour of humans over the past few hundred years rather than nature that has
resulted in the loss of thousands of animal and plant species.

Australia has the worst
extinction record among all developed countries. Today, more than 20 per cent
of the country’s mammals are under threat. Upwards of 700,000 species exist in
Australia, many found nowhere else in the world, but changes to the landscape
and native habitat as a result of human activity over the past 200 years have
put many of these species at risk while too many others have simply
disappeared.

“It will take more than a
million years for the world’s diversity of species to recover,” says Dr
Sarah Bekessy. “Organisations responsible for conserving and restoring the
environment need fundamental knowledge and tools to make the best use of their
resources, just as policy-makers need to know what resources are required and
how to distribute them wisely.”

Dr Bekessy, based at RMIT
University, is a chief investigator with the multi-university Australian
Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions, whose
director is Professor Hugh Possingham at the University of Queensland. With a
$12 million, seven-year grant from the council, the centre has brought together
researchers from RMIT, the universities of Melbourne, Queensland, Western
Australia, the Australian National University, and others from universities in
Britain, Israel, Finland, Germany, South Africa and the US.

“Biodiversity underpins the
cultural and economic prosperity of Australia but our interventions to protect
this natural inheritance are proving inadequate,” Dr Bekessy says.
“Furthermore, our efforts to conserve biodiversity have not been managed
in such a way that allows us to learn from our investment decisions. The new
centre will generate the fundamental knowledge and tools needed to make the
best use of available resources for conservation and will provide new
techniques for assessing what resources are required and innovative ways for
learning from our investment decisions.”

The new centre builds on the work
of a Commonwealth Environmental Research Facility hub established with a
four-year grant in 2006 to develop tools and test methods to support
transparent decision-making for environmental management. The hub was headed by
Professor Possingham, who now also leads a new National Environmental Research
Program network that started this year with 26 primary researchers, 14 in
common with the ARC Centre of Excellence, and spread across the five Australian
universities and the CSIRO.

“We are a group of
researchers based here in Australia and overseas who share a common interest in
the science of environmental decision-making, and specifically decisions
surrounding the conservation of biodiversity,” Professor Possingham says.

“It includes some of the
world’s pre-eminent scientists working in this field and, if you look at the
publishing record of our members, it’s easy to justify the claim that we are
operating at the cutting edge. As well as those from the six overseas
universities, a total of 100 researchers and staff will be involved in our
work, all united by a deep and professional interest in arresting the
catastrophic declines we are witnessing in biodiversity both here and around
the world.”

He says the research questions
being explored have international significance: “For example: how can we
bend the emerging carbon markets to also deliver nature conservation outcomes?
What is the appropriate balance between resources spent monitoring actions and
the actions themselves?”

Dr Bekessy says the new ARC
centre is developing predictive models and decision-making approaches to
achieve better environmental results in the areas of habitat restoration,
spatial planning under rapid and uncertain environmental change, and adaptation
to threats, including climate change. She adds that new tools from mathematics,
statistics, economics and the social sciences are being devised, along with the
compilation of research data.

“The way we operate is to
form working groups on challenging environmental problems — it’s a very
collaborative approach. We try to keep things real with case studies, one of
which is centred on the urban fringes of Melbourne where we have been
investigating grasslands conservation with a PhD student who is looking
specifically at how landholders respond to incentive schemes. We’re using the
information derived from that study to prepare some models of landholder
behaviour that could potentially be of use elsewhere.”

Dr Bekessy says the goal is to
improve the way investment in the environment occurs, with biodiversity the
main focus. The world is facing a biodiversity crisis yet Australia invests too
little in protecting the environment or maintaining biodiversity — and when it
does, too often it is done poorly without monitoring the performance of those
investments.

She points to “debacles in
the past” such as the National Heritage Trust Fund, set up by the Howard
government in 1997 supposedly to help restore and conserve Australia’s
environment and natural resources. For the following decade, thousands of
community groups and organisations received tens of millions of dollars through
the trust for environmental and natural resource management projects.

Yet Dr Bekessy says very little
information was ever collected on how well the scheme worked or what Australia
had to show for the money spent.

“We don’t even know if it
was successful because it was poorly planned and the spending was very
inefficient. That is why our new centre is about doing that sort of thing more
efficiently, how to get more bang for the buck, monitoring so we learn about
systems, making sure that even if there is uncertainty about an investment,
that we learn from that to ensure next time we do things better.”

Source: www.theage.com.au