Australia is one of only 17 ‘mega-biodiverse’ countries globally and contains over 12% of the world’s vertebrate species. Eighty per-cent of species that occur in Australia are found nowhere else on earth.
Since European settlement Australia has recorded 91 extinctions: 37 plants, 27 mammals, 22 birds, 4 frogs, 1 invertebrate. Australia has the highest rate of mammal extinctions globally and is fourth in the world for animal extinction events.

Australia’s extinction crisis is contemporary challenge. Three vertebrate species, the Christmas Island Pipistrelle, Christmas Island Skink and Bramble Cay Melomys, have gone extinct since 2009.

The major drivers of extinction in Australia include habitat destruction and fragmentation, invasive species, over-exploitation and climate change.
Australia’s State of the Environment Report, a statutory report completed by an independent panel and handed to the federal parliament in 2017 noted that:
“The outlook for Australian biodiversity is generally poor, given the current overall poor status, deteriorating trends and increasing pressures. Our current investments in biodiversity management are not keeping pace with the scale and magnitude of current pressures. Resources for managing biodiversity and for limiting the impact of key pressures mostly appear inadequate to arrest the declining status of many species. Biodiversity and broader conservation management will require major reinvestments across long timeframes to reverse deteriorating trends.”
Since 2016 there have been a number of ecosystems across Australia that have begun to demonstrate signs of collapse. These include the death of approximately 50% of corals in the Great Barrier Reef through two successive coral bleaching events, the death of upto one million native fish in the Murray-Darling Basin due over-extraction of water and the death of upto 20,000 nationally threatened Spectacled Flying-foxes (estimated at approximately one third of the total species population) in one heatwave event.
Australian Government’s key piece of environmental legislation is the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. It gives effect to Australia’s international obligations and is intended to protect matters of national environmental significance such as nationally threatened species, world heritage areas and Ramsar convention listed wetlands. However. since this legislation came into force 7.7 million hectares of nationally threatened species habitat has been destroyed and Australia has been declared one of eleven global deforestation hotspots .
Australia’s national environmental law is undergoing a statutory review which is likely to be completed in late 2020.
This motion highlights the significant challenges facing Australia’s biodiversity, the urgency of the need to act, and urges the Australian government to use the opportunity presented through the review of Australia’s national environmental law to demonstrate leadership on the protection of biodiversity.

• Australian Conservation Foundation [Australia]
• Australian Marine Conservation Society [Australia]
• The Wilderness Society [Australia]
• WWF-Australia [Australia]
• World Wide Fund for Nature - International [Switzerland]