Climate change is now a major political talking point in Australia in the last two decades. Persistent drought, and resulting water restrictions during the first decade of the twenty-first century, are an example of natural events' tangible effect on economic and political realities .[1][2][3]
Australia ranks within the top ten countries globally with respect to greenhouse gas emissions per capita.[4]
The current federal and state governments have all publicly stated their belief that climate change is being caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Vocal minority groups within the population campaign against mining and coal-fired power stations in Australia, and such demonstrations are widely reported by the mainstream media.[5] Similarly, vocal minority groups concurrently oppose wind energy schemes, despite being 'carbon neutral', on the grounds of local visual and noise impact and concern for the currently high cost and low reliability of wind energy.[6][7][8]
Despite the publication of the Garnaut report and the Green Paper on the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, public belief in anthropogenic climate change has noticeably eroded following the leaking of e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit.[9][10]
There is claimed to be a net benefit to Australia in stabilising greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at 450ppm CO2 eq[11] in line with the prevailing political stance. Public disagreement with this opinion is generally dismissed as expression of vested interests, for example from the coal industry.
Most of Australia's demand for electricity depends upon coal-fired thermal generation,[12] owing to the plentiful indigenous coal supply, limited potential electric generation and political unwillingness to exploit indigenous uranium resources (although Australia accounted for the world's second highest production of uranium in 2005[13] to fuel a 'carbon neutral' domestic nuclear energy program.[14]
Conservation in Australia is an issue of state and federal policy. Australia is one of the most biologically diverse countries in the world, with a large portion of species endemic to Australia. Preserving this wealth of biodiversity is important for future generations.
A key conservation issue is the preservation of biodiversity, especially by protecting the remaining rainforests. The destruction of habitat by human activities, including land clearing, remains the major cause of biodiversity loss in Australia. The importance of the Australian rainforests to the conservation movement is very high.[16] Australia is the only western country to have large areas of rainforest intact. Forests provide timber, drugs, and food and should be managed to maximise the possible uses. Currently, there are a number of environmental movements and campaigners advocating for action on saving the environment, one such campaign is the Big Switch.
Land management issues including clearance of native vegetation, reafforestation of once-cleared areas, control of exotic weeds and pests, expansion of dryland salinity, and changed fire regimes. Intensification of resource use in sectors such as forestry, fisheries, and agriculture are widely reported to contribute to biodiversity loss in Australia. Coastal and marine environments also have reduced biodiversity from reduced water quality caused by pollution and sediments arising from human settlements and agriculture. In central New South Wales where there are large plains of grassland, problems have risen from—unusual to say—lack of land clearing.
The Daintree Rainforest, a tropical rainforest near Daintree, Queensland covering around 1200 square kilometres, is threatened by logging, development, mining and the effects of the high tourist numbers.
There are some government programs in Australia which are the opposite of conservation (such as killing wildlife); an example of this is shark culling, which currently occurs in New South Wales and Queensland.[17][18]
Native fauna
The Tasmanian devil, officially listed as an endangered species in 2008.
Australia has a poor record of conservation of native fauna. The extinction of Australian megafauna is attributed to the arrival of humans and since European settlement, 23 birds, 4 frogs, and 27 mammal species are also known to have become extinct.
One of the notable issues with marine conservation in Australia is the protection of the Great Barrier Reef. The Great Barrier Reef's environmental pressures include water quality from runoff, climate change and mass coral bleaching, cyclic outbreaks of the crown-of-thorns starfish, overfishing, and shipping accidents. The government of Queensland currently kills sharks in the Great Barrier Reef using drum lines, causing damage to the marine ecosystem.[20]
In 2021 Australia announced the creation of 2 national marine parks in size of 740,000 square kilometres. With those parks 45% of the Australian marine territory will be protected.[21]
Western Australia culled sharks in 2014, killing dozens of tiger sharks and causing public protest.[23] Later that year it was abandoned, and the government of Western Australia continued to shoot and kill sharks it believed to be an "imminent threat" to humans from 2014 to 2017;[24][25] this policy was criticised by senator Rachel Siewart for being environmentally damaging.[26]
From 1962 to the present, the government of Queensland has killed sharks on drum lines and shark nets, a process that also kills other animals such as dolphins[27] and dugongs.[28] From 1962 to 2018, Queensland's "shark control" program killed roughly 50,000 sharks, including sharks in the Great Barrier Reef.[17][20] Queensland's shark-killing program has been called "outdated, cruel and ineffective".[20]
New South Wales has a shark net program that kills sharks as well as other marine life.[29] Between 1950 and 2008, 352 tiger sharks and 577 great white sharks were killed in the nets in New South Wales – also during this period, a total of 15,135 marine animals were killed in the nets, including whales and turtles.[18] There has been a very large decrease in the number of sharks in eastern Australia in recent years, and the shark-killing programs in Queensland and New South Wales are partly responsible for this decrease.[17]
Jessica Morris of Humane Society International calls shark culling a "knee-jerk reaction" and says, "sharks are top order predators that play an important role in the functioning of marine ecosystems. We need them for healthy oceans."[30]
Oil spills
While there have been no oil spill environmental disasters of the scale of the Exxon Valdez in the country, Australia has a large oil industry and there have been several large oil spills [1]. Spills remain a serious threat to the marine environment and Australian coastline. The largest spill to date was the Kirki tanker in 1991 which dropped 17,280 tonnes of oil off the coast of Western Australia.
In March 2009, the 2009 southeast Queensland oil spill occurred, where 200,000 litres were spilled from the MV Pacific Adventurer spilling more than 250 tonnes of oil, 30 tonnes of fuel and other toxic chemicals on Brisbane's suburban beaches. Premier Anna Bligh described the spill as "worst environmental disaster Queensland has ever seen".[31]
A serious issue to the Australian marine environment is the dumping of rubbish from ships. There have been a number of cases,[32] particularly involving the navy of Australian and other countries polluting Australian waters including the dumping of chemical warfare agents. Recently documented cases include the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan in 2006 which was found to be dumping rubbish off the shores of Moreton Island.[33] In Victoria, a large number of toxic drums containing 1,2-Dichlorobenzene xylenol, a substance very toxic to aquatic creatures washed up on beaches during May 2009 presumably fallen off a passing container ship.[34]
The cane toad invasion has devastated Australian wildlife through a combination of their toxicity to predators and outcompetition of native species
Australia's geographical isolation has resulted in the evolution of many delicate ecological relationships that are sensitive to foreign invaders and in many instances provided no natural predators for many of the species subsequently introduced.[citation needed] The introduction and prolific breeding of animal species such as the cane toad (Rhinella marina) and rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) had greatly disrupted native species populations.[35][36] Introduced species in Australia are problematic in that they may outcompete or, in the case of the can toad, red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and feral domestic cats (Felis catus), directly kill native species. Rabbits in Australia along with feral beasts of burden disrupt native species by destroying vulnerable habitat requiring drastic pest-exclusion measures such as the Rabbit-proof fence.[37]The cane toad invasion is particularly concerning due to them having few predators and apart from extensively outcompeting native species[38] their toxicity kills thousands of native apex predators each year.[39] The threat of the ongoing cane toad invasion has seen the establishment of a national taskforce despite its potential range being limited to the north of the continent.[40] Likewise Tasmania takes the threat of the species so seriously that it has a government sponsored taskforce to prevent fox populations from taking hold on the island.[41] The species has single-handedly caused the extinction of several native species on the mainland.[42]
Australia is also vulnerable to invasive weeds. Controlling the invasion of prickly pears in Australia is one of the success stories of invasive species control. The government maintains a Weeds of National Significance (WONS) list of problematic plant species.[43]
Land degradation
According to Jared Diamond, "Australia's number-one environmental problem [is] land degradation".[44] Land degradation results from nine types of damaging environmental impacts:[44]
Clearcutting of old growth forests is continuing in parts of Australia. This often involves the destruction of natural ecosystems and the replacement with monoculture plantations.
In the prehistory of Australia the Indigenous Australians used fire-stick farming which was an early form of land clearing which caused long term changes to the ecology. With European colonisation land clearing continued on a larger scale for agriculture – particularly for cattle, cotton and wheat production. Since European settlement a total of 13% of native vegetation cover has been lost. The extinction of 20 different mammals, 9 bird and 97 plant species have been partially attributed to land clearing. Land clearing is a major source of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions, and contributed to approximately 12 percent of Australia's total emissions in 1998.
The consequences of land clearing include dryland salinity and soil erosion. These are a major concern to the landcare movement in Australia.
The clearing of native vegetation is controlled by Federal laws (indirectly), State law and local planning instruments. The precise details of regulation of vegetation clearing differ according to the location where clearing is proposed.
Soil salinity affects 50,000 km² of Australia and is predominantly due to land clearance.
Waterway health
A Parks Victoria litter trap on the river catches floating rubbish on the Yarra at Birrarung Marr
The protection of waterways in Australia is a major concern for various reasons including habitat and biodiversity, but also due to use of the waterways by humans.
The Murray-Darling Basin is under threat due to irrigation in Australia, causing high levels of salinity which affect agriculture and biodiversity in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia. These rivers are also affected by pesticide run-off and drought. Low oxygen levels in the water combined with high temperatures has led to fish kills in the Darling River in 2018, 2019 and 2023.[46] The worst was in March 2023 in which millions of dead bony bream, golden perch silver perch and some Murray cod flowed down the river.[46]
Australian waterways facing environmental issues
Rivers and creeks in urban areas also face environmental issues, particularly pollution.
Water use is a major sustainability issue in Australia. Water is becoming a very very big problem for not only Australia but worldwide as where there are droughts occurring more often and only having limited use of the water and then there are even places that don't have any water at all such as India etc, we need conserve our water for the future and get more access to the water since we only have roughly 5% access to it.[62]
Urbanisation
The urban sprawl of Melbourne, spreading from the city centre (towards top right of the image).
Australia is one of the most urbanised countries in the world. Many Australian cities have large urban footprints and are characterised by an unsustainable low density urban sprawl. This places demand on infrastructure and services which contributes to the problems of land clearing, pollution, transport related emissions, energy consumption, invasive species, automobile dependency and urban heat islands.
A Queensland beach with the skyline of the heavily developed Gold Coast in the background. Formerly swamplands, the city was urbanised on a coastal strip between waterways and the sea and now contains many high rises.
In recent years, some cities have implemented transit-oriented development strategies to curb the urban sprawl. Notable examples include Melbourne 2030,[66]South East Queensland Regional Plan and the Sydney Metropolitan Strategy. There are also population decentralisation programs at state and federal levels aimed at shifting populations out of the major centres and stemming the drivers to rapid urbanisation. Albury-Wodonga was part of the federal government's program of decentralisation begun in the 1970s, which has at times had relocation policies for immigration. The Victorian government has run a decentralisation program since the 1960s, having had a ministerial position appointed and ongoing promotional and investment programs for stimulating growth in Regional Victoria. However policy has swung over the decades, primarily due to local development priorities and agendas and a lack of federal co-ordination to the problem.
Issues include large quantities of e-waste and toxic waste going into landfill. Australia does not have restrictions on the dumping of toxic materials that are common in other countries, such as dumping Cathode Ray Tubes which leach heavy metals into water catchments. Due to the lack of sufficient sites for toxic waste disposal large quantities of toxic waste are trucked between states to remote dumping grounds or exported overseas in ships.[67]
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (March 2009)
The following is a list of development projects that have been controversial due to concerns of environmental effects. This list includes projects required to submit an Environmental Effects Statement.
Now a prohibited area (exclusion zone) known as the Wittenoom Prohibited Area.[70] Widespread contamination causing thousands of cancers (including mesothelioma) and many hundreds of deaths.[71] In addition to widespread contamination about half the material mined by Australian Blue Asbestos was distributed throughout Australia resulting in an ongoing public health crisis.[72] Australia banned use of asbestos in 2003.[73]
Clearing of urban bushland to build a swimming pool and car park. A campaign by a coalition of scientific, naturalist and heritage groups prevented it from going ahead.[76]
Mounts Bay
Infilling
Western Australia
1963
Infilling of the Swan River to create land for freeway construction. This was opposed by the Citizens’ Committee for the Protection of Kings Park and the Swan River.[76]
Clearing of Newcastle bushland for the construction of an expressway. Work was halted by a BLF green ban and the area subsequently protected.[78]
Riley’s Island
Clearing
New South Wales
1973
Clearing of native habitat for suburban development. A BLF green ban halted work and the area was made a nature reserve in 1989.[78]
Port Kembla Beach
Clearing, dredging
New South Wales
1974
Dredging for sandmining and clearing for property development. Halted by South Coast Labour Council and BLF work bans.[78]
Terania Creek
Logging
New South Wales
1979
Logging of old growth rainforest. After four weeks of blockading, a moratorium was placed on work and a government inquiry subsequently held, after which the area was added to the newly created Nightcap National Park.[79][80]
Middle Head Beach
Sand mining
New South Wales
1980
Destruction of beach and sacred sites by industrial dredging. Following months of blockading the neighbouring beach at Grassy Head beach was spared and the NSW government granted no more beach sand mining leases after 1980.[81]
Logging of old growth rainforest at Grier’s Scrub and Mount Nardi. Following blockading, work was halted at the latter and the area later made part of the Nightcap National Park.[79]
Potential radioactive toxicity and damage to habitat due to mine leaks. The proposed Honeymoon uranium mine was delayed for almost 20 years by campaigns involving unions, traditional owners and environmentalists. It opened in 2011 but then closed in 2013 due to a decline in demand for uranium.[81]
Damming of forested area, watercourse damage, reduced water flow. Catalyst for the foundation of the Australian Greens. The project was cancelled by the Hawke federal ALP government in 1983, following a three month blockade of clearing and over 1000 arrests.[82]
Clearing of rainforest in a national park to build a track. Threat of increased development. Track was pushed through in 1984 but quickly deteriorated and was not refurbished after the area was granted World Heritage status.[79]
Possible contamination of land with radioactive mine tailings. Mine construction was disrupted by blockades in 1983 and 1984 before opening in 1988.[83]
Farmhouse Creek
Road building, logging
Tasmania
1986
Clearing to build a road to facilitate the logging of old growth forest. Opposed by a blockade using Australia’s first tree sit platform. Following further blockading, parts of the area were eventually granted protection after a federal government inquiry.[81]
Destruction of little bent-wing bat breeding habitat through the blasting of caves to enable limestone mining. A blockade led to mining being halted for six months but in 1988 the caves were destroyed.[79]
Road construction to enable the logging of old growth forest. Blockading held up the project before a court injunction stopped work due to the presence of Aboriginal sacred sites. The area gained protection the following year after another injunction was gained due to illegal logging and faults with an Environmental Impact Statement. It was added to the Washpool National Park in 1999.[79]
Logging of old growth habitat in a state forest. Following protest action work was stopped by a court injunction. The area was added to the Mount Royal National Park in 1997.[79]
Logging of old growth forest. Work was blockaded and then halted after the NSW Forestry Commission was ordered to undertake an Environment Impact Statement. When logging was resumed in 1991 it was disrupted by blockaders until a further court injunction stopped work. A further attempt to log was prevented by direct action in 1994 and the area subsequently made a national park.[79]
Logging of old growth forest. Blockading disrupted work and in 1991 a government inquiry report led to logging being phased out. The island was later accorded World Heritage status.[79]
Logging of old growth forest, which was disrupted by blockaders and then suspended for three years. Logging was later resumed leading to another blockade in 2009.[79]
Logging of old growth forest. A three month long blockade prevented cutting. The Mummel Gulf National Park and Mummel Gulf State Conservation Area were created in 1999.[79]
Mining for limestone within a World Heritage area and its effects on a 21 kilometre long cave system. Following protests blasting was halted by the federal government but mining continued until the Bender Limestone quarry was closed in 1994.[79]
Old growth forest logging. Blockading stalled work until 1997 when the contractor agreed to withdraw from the area. It was made part of the Nightcap National Park the following year.[79]
Clearing of urban bushland in Sydney including Aboriginal sacred sites and 100 000 trees. Construction was opposed by protesters using lockons, treesits and site occupations.[79]
Destruction of beach and Aboriginal sacred sites for suburban development. Following blockading and litigation clearing was put on hold. The developer, who later went bankrupt, was ordered to rehabilitate the site.[79]
Destruction of red river gum habitat by logging and poor farming practices. The issue had been a major one for traditional owners and environmentalists for some years but the two came together in the late 1990s and increased their campaigning efforts. In 2008 the Victorian government placed 91,000 hectares under protection and agreed to co-management with traditional owners.[84]
Clearing and toxicity risks associated with the construction of a uranium mine. Traditional owners called for nonviolent direct action against construction and this eventually involved 5000 people. They also refused to grant use of their land. Following campaigning and court cases Rio Tinto cancelled the project in 2001 and later engaged in rehabilitation works.[85]
Deforestation approved by the Howard government. Operators significantly breached environmental laws resulting in excessive irreparable land clearing.[86]
Uneconomic. Pollution of the Bass Coast. Accusations of government/private entity corruption. Lack of consultation with community. No justification for perceived requirement. Insufficient initial assessment. Insufficient EES.
Dredging in heavy metal-laiden shipping ports posed contamination concerns. Destruction of marine environments. Catalyst for the foundation of the Blue Wedges community group.
Habitat destruction through the construction of a 30 km gas refinery site. A protest camp bringing together First Nations community members, environmentalists and others disrupted preliminary work before Woodside abandoned the project. The WA Supreme Court subsequently found that the environmental approvals originally enabling it to go ahead were illegal.[81][87]
Leard State forest
Clearing
New South Wales
2012
Clearing of forest habitat for construction of the Maules Creek coal mine. Work was disrupted by nonviolent direct action.[88]
Clearing of wetlands habitat and Aboriginal sacred sites for tollway construction. Following a blockade involving over 1000 people the project was cancelled.[81]
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^Knight, Kim (2016). "The importance of revisiting landform design after key decision-making events". Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Mine Closure. Australian Centre for Geomechanics, Perth. pp. 121–130. doi:10.36487/acg_rep/1608_06_knight. ISBN9780992481049. ISSN2208-8296.
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