South Australia’s Tattered Environmental Remains

South Australia State budget percentage expenditures for health, education and environment

Yesterday I gave the second keynote address at the South Australia Natural Resource Management (NRM) Science Conference at the University of Adelaide (see also a brief synopsis of Day 1 here). Unfortunately, I’m missing today’s talks because of an acute case of man cold, but at least I can stay at home and work while sipping hot cups of tea.

Many people came up afterwards and congratulated me for “being brave enough to tell the truth”, which both encouraged and distressed me – I am encouraged by the positive feedback, but distressed by the lack of action on the part of our natural resource management leaders.

The simple truth is that South Australia’s biodiversity and ecosystems are in shambles, yet few seem to appreciate this.

So for the benefit of those who couldn’t attend, I’ve uploaded my slideshow for general viewing here, and I understand that a podcast might be available in the very near future. I’ve also highlighted some key points from the talk below:

• Australia ranks 9th worst in the world for absolute environmental degradation [1]
• We have a legacy of deforestation, most notably in south-western Western Australia and Queensland from the mid-1970s to 2000s [2]
• Australia has the highest modern mammal extinction rate on Earth, and declines are continuing
• Australia has the world’s longest, contiguous human-made structure in the world – the ‘dog’ fence. It costs taxpayers millions to maintain each year and prevents dingoes from suppressing feral meso-predators (cats, foxes) that eat native wildlife
• Australia has elected the most environmentally destructive federal government in modern history, with already a legacy of devastating anti-environmental policies implemented within only 6 months of taking office (see also great discussion on this here)
• Most of South Australia’s forests were cleared in the 19th and early 20th Centuries [2]
• Native forests cover only about 9 % of the State’s area [2]
• There is < 10 % of the original forest cover in the Mount Lofty Ranges [2]
• There is < 4 % of the original forest cover left in the Adelaide Plains [2]
• Broad-scale clearing of vegetation was apparently stopped in 1991 with the implementation of the Native Vegetation Act; however, each year in South Australia there are between 1000 and 2000 hectares legally cleared, and over 200 hectares cleared illegally [2, 3]
• Only about 1 % of the South Australian State Budget is allocated to the environment (including the EPA), which compares to about 20-25 % for both health and education. Nationally, it’s about 1.2 % (see figure above)
• This is despite over 5 % of the State’s revenue depending on agriculture in the broadest definition of the term (it is 2.4 % nationally), with 56 % of the $3 billion national wine exports coming from South Australia. We also depend on $760 million annual from the seafood industry and substantial proportion of our income from tourism indirectly linked to our environment
• Yet there is no dedicated, broad-scale research into the importance of pollinator communities on these essential sources of income, or the role of healthy coastal systems on our fisheries production
• According to the 2013 State of the Environment South Australia report [3], the grades given to various components are:
  • native vegetation = poor
  • threatened species & communities = very poor and declining
  • soil condition = fair
  • introduced species = very poor
  • marine communities = extent and condition declining
  • pollution = decreasing
  • human population pressures = increasing
  • threatened marine species = increasing protection, but heightened threat from sea level rise and ocean acidification
• Having reviewed the biodiversity and marine chaptersof theSOE13 report [3] myself, I can confidently say thatthere are a few problems still with it:
  • It provides misleading statements about total vegetation cover (i.e., it glosses over the devastating losses already incurred)
  • It mentions biodiversity offsets as a meaningful component to combat continued vegetation losses, when it has been clearly demonstrated [4] that biodiversity offsets do not work, because native vegetation cannot be replaced (both in terms of biodiversity and function)
  • The indicator species chosen are apparently random, not justified in terms of function or representativeness and do not provide adequate coverage of the State’s ecosystems
  • There is inadequate long-term monitoring data or capacity in South Australia, such that it is impossible to track change in environmental performance over time
  • The State has an unachievable and distracting ‘lose no species’ policy (see here for critique)
  • There is no dedicated legislation for ecosystem protection in South Australia apart from the Native Vegetation Act 1991 and the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1972. Ecosystem considerations are mere afterthoughts in otherwise non-targeted legislation
• There are some smaller ecological function projects being done around the state (see one example I’m involved with here), but nothing that’s across agricultural and environmental sectors, and nothing of large enough scope to make a difference

In summary, the major impediments to environmental improvement in South Australia are:

• There is a State-level disconnect between biodiversity conservation and agriculture;
• The pastorlism industry has a strangle-hold on the NRM Boards and Biosecurity SA;
• There are too many piecemeal cross-institutional research projects, and little big-picture leadership;
• The national anti-environment agenda is killing state initiatives;
• There is too much complacency and nearly no environmental leadership in Parliament

So what to do?

• We need to arrest all native vegetation clearance immediately;
• We need state-wide forest and soil carbon assessments;
• We need dedicated ecosystem intactness legislation;
• We need a representative system of long-term monitoring sites and the associated funding to support them in perpetuity;
• We need a much better research agenda to determine the water flow regimes on wetland health and function;
• We need broad-scale reforestation endeavours linked to the carbon assessments and markets arising;
• We need agricultural intensification, not expansion, to limit land transformation.

There is no one left alive in South Australia that can remember the pre-European environmental baseline, so we have a jaded and myopic view of what our environment should look like. Complicate this shifting baseline syndrome with the rapidity of climate changes, and you have a confused, rudderless management outlook that will continue to degrade our ailing life-support system.

References

1. Bradshaw, C. J. A., X. Giam, and N. S. Sodhi. 2010. Evaluating the relative environmental impact of countries. PLoS One 5:e10440
2. Bradshaw, C. J. A. 2012. Little left to lose: deforestation and forest degradation in Australia since European colonization. Journal of Plant Ecology 5:109-120
3. South Australia Environmental Protection Authority. 2013. State of the Environment South Australia. Adelaide
4. Bekessy, S. A., B. A. Wintle, D. B. Lindenmayer, M. A. McCarthy, M. Colyvan, M. A. Burgman, and H. P. Possingham. 2010. The biodiversity bank cannot be a lending bank. Conservation Letters 3:151-158