Governments often lack necessary data to determine if conservation measures are effective, says review’s leader

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

One-third of Australia’s threatened species are not subject to any formal monitoring program and monitoring for the remaining species is largely poorly done, a review has found.

The findings come as the ABC reports the federal environment department could cut up to 60 jobs in its biodiversity and conservation division, which conducts threatened species assessment and monitoring.

The review, conducted by the Threatened Species Recovery Hub, assessed monitoring programs against nine criteria, including whether they covered the species’ entire range, were conducted regularly and over an extended period of time, were clearly linked to management strategies and whether the data from monitoring was publicly available.

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Almost half of all fish and reptile species received no monitoring and 21% of mammals were unmonitored.

The review’s leader, Assoc Prof Sarah Legge from the Australian National University, said the results were worse than expected and meant governments in many cases lacked the necessary data to determine whether conservation measures were effective.

“It’s like trying to manage your household budget when you don’t know what’s in your bank account,” Legge said. “If you don’t know what the trends of those populations are … you have got no way of knowing if your management interventions are working.”

Legge is the deputy director of the Threatened Species Recovery Hub, which is part of the National Environmental Science Program.

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Australia has 548 threatened animal species, of which 506 have been officially listed under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. Legge said those species that were listed under the act – rather than by international mechanisms, such as the IUCN Red List – were more likely to have an effective monitoring program.

Species with a recovery plan fared better than those without one, though the plans are rarely funded and fully implemented.

“The reality is that only a fraction of our threatened species have a recovery plan and that fraction is decreasing all the time,” Legge said.

The findings are significant and slightly unexpected, Legge said, because they show federal policy interventions do have a positive effect.

“It has been a bit depressing, honestly – the last few years with budget cuts and the way recovery plans have been funded … That whole space is a bit depressing,” she said. “To see that these policy interventions do have impacts is nice and it is worth persisting with them.”

The suggestion of further staff cuts at the federal biodiversity and conservation division has not been confirmed by the environment minister, Josh Frydenberg.

“If one of the results is that there’s less staffing resources to do threatened species listing, assessments and recovery plan preparation – that’s really bad news,” Legge said.

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A spokesman from Frydenberg’s office said details of the department’s budget position would be made clear when the federal budget was released on 8 May, adding that money from the $1bn Landcare program and $200m threatened species program was being “spent on the ground where it is needed and where it can make the most difference”.

Legge said a number of species had “very effective” monitoring programs conducted by NGOs or Indigenous corporations, which covered a particular portion of the species’ range, but few species had monitoring that covered their entire range.

Frogs were quite well covered because they typically have a very small range, and “one or two people can keep on top of the entire species”.