{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Australia claims it\u2019s \u2018on track\u2019 to meet its environment targets. Scientists disagree","description":"Australia is one of 17 \u201cmegadiverse\u201d countries that account for 70% of Earth\u2019s biodiversity. However, Australia is unique in having the highest mammalian extinction rate in the world. That makes conservation on the island continent, where most of the wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth, all the more urgent. Conservation and environmental scientists have come out against the Australian federal government\u2019s claim that it\u2019s \u201con track\u201d to meet most of its targets under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework agreed upon at the U.N. biodiversity summit in 2022. This week on the Mongabay Newscast, Euan Ritchie, a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at Australia\u2019s Deakin University, and a councilor with the Biodiversity Council, an academic alliance in the country, argues why conservationists say the Australian government is failing its commitments. \u201cThe short answer, unfortunately, is that Australia is doing terribly in terms of honoring its international obligations to meet those targets in the agreement. If we look at the number of threatened species in Australia, it's more than 2,200 now, and that list continues to increase,\u201d Ritchie says. Despite being a relatively wealthy nation by gross domestic product per capita, Australia funds conservation at a diminutive scale compared to other industrialized countries. The latest annual budget allocates 0.06% of federal spending to nature. Ritchie and some 60 fellow experts suggest that it would only take about 1% of the federal budget to save most threatened species and restore soils and rivers. In 2024, the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists published its findings, which took six years to complete. The Biodiversity Council has separately found that around 95% of Australians surveyed would support increased spending on the environment. \u201cEssentially, the federal government is ignoring a majority of Australians by not doing that,\u201d Ritchie says. He argues the money to fund conservation already exists \u2014 or at least could easily exist by reducing subsidies for harmful industries (such as the fossil fuel industry), which currently amount to around A$26 billion ($19 billion) a year. Separately, a 25% tax on liquefied natural gas exports could generate A$17 billion ($12 billion) a year, a move nationwide polling suggests is supported by 70% of Australians. Despite the perceived strong public support, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has ruled out a 25% tax on gas exports for the time being, which Ritchie says is very hard to understand, pointing to countries like Norway, which built its own sovereign wealth fund off similar measures. As of this writing, the Australian government has lost about A$70 billion ($50 billion) in revenue it could have collected had it taxed these resources, according to an online tracker by the Australia Institute, an independent think tank. \u201cWe could bring in tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue if we taxed the resources that we are giving away, essentially in many cases for free,\u201d Ritchie says. Instead of increasing direct conservation funding, the Australian government intends to close the gap by launching a \u201cNature Repair Market,\u201d a voluntary biodiversity offset scheme. It\u2019s essentially a way for industry and private investors to pay for the damage they cause. Research indicates this is unlikely to protect endangered wildlife and biodiversity without taxpayer funding. Other researchers from the University of Melbourne and the University of New South Wales have also weighed in, explaining that a biodiversity market is unlikely to work. Ritchie says this is problematic for a number of other reasons, ranging from the complexity of biodiversity itself, to the way the government intends to measure environmental impacts from various projects. Currently, the national environmental standards in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) doesn\u2019t \u201caccount for cumulative impacts,\u201d Ritchie says. \u201cSo if you imagine that you're a threatened species and you're widely distributed \u2026 Individual projects are not being assessed in relation to other projects that may also impact on that same species,\u201d he says. \u201cSo it is literally death by a thousand cuts.\u201d Listen to a conversation on biodiversity offsets in Australia with Yung En Chee here. Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast here. Image Credit: Black-flanked rock wallaby (Petrogale lateralis) in Cape Range National Park, Western Australia, Australia. The Australian government has classed the species as endangered under the EPBC Act. Image by Dsyzdek via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). \u2014- Time codes (00:00) \u2018Failing miserably\u2019 on the environment (10:21) A \u2018Nature Repair Market\u2019 is not a solution (23:47) New nature reform laws passed (29:44) Plentiful sources of funding (35:37) Native forest logging harms ","author_name":"Mongabay Newscast","author_url":"https:\/\/www.mongabay.com\/podcast\/","html":"