The Australian Conservation Foundation’s annual report ‘Extinction Wrapped’ has again detailed how native species are increasingly threatened. It has claimed that the Federal Government is partly to blame for giving the green light to an increase in habitat destruction.
What would Australia be without its animals? Sheep and cattle were once the backbone of the nation’s economy. The kangaroo and the emu flank the coat of arms.
Yet, last year the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) has found that huge areas of habitat used by native fauna has been approved for land clearing.
Data obtained from the ACF annual ‘Extinction Wrapped’ report (2025)
University of Wollongong director of Bush Risk Management, Associate Professor Owen Price says this forms part of a broader ‘hypocrisy’ that Australia has in regards to its animals, particularly native fauna.
“It’s illegal in Australia, anywhere in Australia to kill a native animal,” Dr Price says.
“You can’t go into the forest and shoot a possum but they’ll give a permit to somebody to cut down 100,000 acres of forest and they will kill 100,000 possums, but that’s not illegal.”
Dr Price recalls an occasion when he was advising on the Daly Basin in the Northern Territory, highlighting the need for clarity, especially when communicating with farmers who make use of the land.
“We went on a field trip with some farmers…one of them said to me we don’t necessarily want to be regulated but what we want is certainty. So, if you tell us that this is the rule we’ll live with it,” Dr Price said.
Director of the Northern Territory Environment Centre, Kirsty Howe says that the land clearing in the northern territory is reaching a tipping point.
“We’re facing a deforestation crisis here in the Territory, with the bulldozers rolling in on the world’s last intact tropical savanna, while the federal government looks away,” Ms Howe told the ABC.
According to the ACFs ‘Extinction Wrapped’ (2025) report, since 2011 the mining sector in Australia has accounted for 65 per cent of all approved bulldozing of habitat of threatened species.
While Dr Price agrees that mining is responsible for the destruction of the habitat of native species he still believes that it is important to consider that when compared to agriculture, mining’s impact is lesser.
“In terms of area, agriculture is by far the biggest. Mining is not actually that huge. In some certain parts in the Hunter there’s lots of it,” he said.
But he maintains that mining has several viable alternative solutions in order to lessen or alleviate its impact on native fauna.
“Take the case of mining, mining can actually be done underground. You can do it in a way you haven’t actually destroyed habitat. I know it’s more expensive but that’s the choice that we as humans have to make,” he said.
“Then there’s the case of you can have a mine and at the end of a mine’s life you can fill it back in again and rehabilitate it. There are options rather than saying: you can’t do mining at all.”
Among the animals most threatened are native land mammals, in particular quolls.
Data obtained from the ACF annual ‘Extinction Wrapped’ report (2025)
“It’s the lowland areas. Any species that has that as their specialist habitat,” Dr Price says.
“There’s not been any mammals or reptiles or frogs or birds that have become extinct in New South Wales, but there are lots that are now threatened, mostly because of habitat loss.”
Post graduate researcher of quolls, Aidan Clifton, who has studied the marsupial in the an area known as the ‘Thin Green Line’, believes there is no doubt that deforestation and habitat destruction are the biggest threat to native land mammals.
“Particularly with quolls they’re very forest dependent. So their greatest threat at the moment is habitat loss and fragmentation,” Mr Clifton said.
Fragmentation, as Mr Clifton explains, is one of the driving destructive factors against native land mammals, not merely land clearing.
“As we create roads or destroy bits of forest, larger bits of single continuous patches of forest get broken up into smaller patches… this creates what is essentially islands for forest dependent species,” he says.
“Animals that must live in the forest can’t then travel between different patches of forest and they become trapped.
“And this… increases competition between animals and plants there, as they have fewer resources, there’s less food, less shelter so they start to outcompete each other and that has really negative affects on these populations,” Mr Clifton said.
However, he maintains that while fragmentation and habitat destruction are genuine and primary threats, that is not where the story ends.
“There are a bunch of other threats which we presume are threatening them but there’s a lot more research to be done on things like invasive species, the impacts of cats and foxes…climate change, and the impact of cane toads,” he says.
Dr Price also alleges that the government’s stance on land clearing and native fauna protection has been weak.
“One of the things about land clearing is, it’s not random. they’re not just taking out chunks…they target particular places so in the early days it would be those places are more fertile,” he says.
“Although the government pays lip service to the fact that they’re protecting biodiversity, they don’t really, because they’ve never really put a stop to land clearing.”
Dr Price also believes that we may need to move toward more dense urbanisation in order to curb the impact of humans on the environment.
“Our classic Australian home is the quarter acre block and everyone’s got a single story house stuck on it. Well that’s a luxury that maybe we can’t afford anymore,” he says.
“You wouldn’t find that sort of thing in Hong Kong where everyone lives in a fifty story apartment. They can’t sprawl. For us it’s a choice.”
He also suggested that intensive agriculture may be a possible solution to the crisis of land clearing currently threatening Australia’s native fauna and flora.
“Intensive agriculture. We have to do that. We have to grow our food. You can grow a lot of food in a small amount of space with intensive agriculture,” Dr Price said.
The ACFs next Extinction Wrapped report is scheduled to come out in January next year.
