According To Report Card Australia Drops a Bombshell and Nobody Should Ignore It
In the past five years, severe coral bleaching events have bleached a third of the Great Barrier Reef, flash floods have ravaged the tropical north, and devastating bushfires have collectively burned more than 46 million acres of land ( 72,000 square miles) has been burned.
With such a potentially disastrous estimate on the cards, critics accused the government of sitting on the report to avoid bad press at a critical moment before the election. Only now, with a change in government – an outcome hailed in the media as a historic ‘climate election’ – are the report’s findings emerging,

and they are as dire as many expected. There was fear. The overall conclusion of the report is that climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and resource extraction have pushed Australia’s environment into a state of serious and critical degradation.
Urgent action could still turn things around, but according to the report’s key findings, “Australia currently lacks a framework that delivers comprehensive environmental management”. While the scale of the challenge continues to grow, collaborative action is scarce.
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“While this is a controversial study, Australians deserve the truth,” said Environment Minister Tanya Pilbersek. “We deserve to know that communities at risk have increased by 20 percent in the last five years and places that are literally at risk from devastating fires.”
Overall, the condition of Australia’s coastal beaches and waters is said to be “poor”, and land is even worse. Of the 18 ecosystems considered ‘threatened’, 10 are terrestrial. Today, a third of Australia’s original eucalyptus forests have been cleared, as have nearly half of the country’s casuarina forests and woodlands.
So much vegetation has been lost, invasive plant species now outnumber native species. Australian fauna is also affected as a result. Between 2000 and 2017, more than 7.7 million hectares of potential habitat for threatened species were cleared,
much of it without assessment under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Truth be told, Australia has one of the greatest paces of species decrease on the planet and has proactively lost more warm blooded creature species than some other mainland.
In the next two decades, experts predict that the northern hopping mouse, rock rat, Christmas Island flying fox, and black-footed tree rat could all become extinct. And there are probably other endangered species that we are not counting.
Some experts believe that about 70 percent of Australia’s plant and animal species have yet to be discovered or described by scientists. That is why indigenous knowledge is so invaluable.
People who have lived in Australia for tens of thousands of years have a deep understanding of what healthy, native ecosystems look like and how best to manage them. For the first time, the 2021 State of the Environment Report devotes an entire chapter to the role of First Nations people in conservation,
giving Indigenous Australians a voice in the country’s environmental heritage. Brendan Wintle, an ecosystem and forestry scientist at the University of Melbourne, who was not involved in the recent climate report, told The New York Times that the findings “are a harbinger of an extinction crisis in Australia, unless we change.
See” Thankfully, that’s what the majority of the Australian public is calling for. In May 2022, without even seeing the 2021 report, voters turned out in historic numbers to elect politicians with a strong climate agenda.
Clearly, in a nation reeling from climate disaster after climate disaster, shrugging off the climate report can’t hide the dire truth – and now we have all the details in heart-wrenching detail.