The head of the world’s leading conservation organisation has criticised the Australian government’s attempt to strip world heritage protection from Tasmania’s forests, as new data laid bare the vast number of ecosystems in Australia at risk of collapse.

Julia Marton-Lefèvre, director general of the IUCN, the body that advises the United Nations on conservation matters, told Guardian Australia it was “disappointing” that the Abbott government had launched a bid to remove 74,000ha of Tasmanian forest from world heritage protection.

A meeting in June of Unesco’s world heritage committee took just nine minutes to reject Australia’s proposal. Portugal’s delegate heaped further embarrassment upon the Coalition by calling its rationale for the removal “feeble”.

“Australia on the whole has a very good record on protected areas [but] there are challenges, such as the Tasmanian issues,” Marton-Lefèvre said. “They aren’t the first country to try to take away a commitment, but it would send a bad message if the world heritage committee allowed Australia to do that.

“They didn’t allow them to do that, they didn’t allow them to regress, and that listing should not be revised. I’m disappointed that any government would try that but I believe Australia has accepted the decision.”

The Coalition had claimed that the forest listing, part of a larger world heritage extension agreed by the previous Labor government, unfairly locked out the timber industry and was not world heritage quality due to heavy degradation caused by previous logging. IUCN experts rejected this latter assertion.

Marton-Lefèvre said Australia, like other countries, needed to realise that leaving carbon-dense forests standing was preferable, economically and environmentally, than cutting them down.

“Standing forests are worth far more than those that are cut down,” she said. “You can make money from timber tomorrow, but standing forests can capture and store carbon and provide much better value for communities long term.

“There is around 2bn hectares of degraded land in the world and we want to restore that. It would be much better to take forest supplies from this degraded land than to destroy undamaged forests. We could restore degraded land and have timber products from it – it would be a win-win for everybody.

“Leaving these forests standing is important not just for Tasmania and Australia, but to all of us in the world. We need to understand the role of nature in our lives before we destroy it.”

Marton-Lefèvre, who is in Sydney for the once-in-a decade meeting of the World Parks Congress this week, was more positive about the Australian government’s efforts to avoid the Great Barrier Reef being listed “in danger” by the world heritage committee next year.

“From what I understand, Australia is looking to protect the reef and there has been good dialogue on the issue,” she said. “The Great Barrier Reef is not just an Australian thing, it belongs to all of us. We will encourage Australia to continue discussions and then hopefully it won’t be on the ‘in-danger’ list. Australia doesn’t want to be embarrassed over this.”

The comments were made as a new report by WWF illustrated the previously unquantified threat faced by Australia’s natural spaces.

The WWF analysis used 40 years of satellite imagery and land use mapping to find that nearly half of 5,815 Australian terrestrial ecosystems, covering an area of approximately 257m ha, would be listed as threatened under IUCN criteria because of land clearing and degradation.

This vast number of threatened ecosystems, primarily due to the clearing of land for agriculture, dwarfs the 66 ecological communities officially listed as threatened by the Australian government.

Since 1972, the fastest rate of land clearing and degradation has occurred in the catchment area of the Great Barrier Reef and the biodiversity-rich region of south-west Australia, the study shows.

“Land clearing has had a pretty dramatic impact and there a lot more endangered ecosystems than are currently listed,” Dr Martin Taylor, conservation scientist at WWF, told Guardian Australia. “There was previously a myth that animals just up and leave areas that have been razed but that’s clearly not the case.

“Land clearing laws have been powerful instruments in curtailing threats to species but some jurisdictions, such as Queensland, are winding back laws. The latest evidence is there’s been an uptick in land clearing after a long period of decline, which is a very worrying situation, not only for biodiversity but also for carbon emissions.”

A separate study also released on Monday, by the Places You Love alliance, a coalition of 42 Australian environment groups, showed worrying deteriorations on a number of health and conservation fronts.

The report’s findings include:

More than 3,000 Australians die every year from air-pollution-related illness, nearly twice the national road toll.

Total consumption of natural resources per person in Australia is one of the highest in the world and is projected to increase by up to 27% by 2030.

One million hectares of Australian native vegetation was cleared every year between 2000 and 2010.

Of the 68 zones of the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia’s most significant agricultural region, only one zone is rated as being in good health.





Since 1985 more than half the Great Barrier Reef’s coral has been lost, with remaining coral cover predicted to be lost with two degrees of warming through climate change.

“Nature supports our lives, livelihoods and our quality of life. Every single thing we need to live comes from nature: our rivers, climate, soils, oceans and forests,” said Kelly O’Shanassy, chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation, one of the alliance’s groups.

“If nature was a bank account, we’d be eating through the capital, not the interest – and when we do that with our savings, eventually we go bankrupt.”