[Music plays]
(Dr. Tara Martin) Australia is facing an unprecedented
decline in biodiversity, as is the globe,
and one of the challenges is that there is a huge amount
of uncertainty in terms of how to deal with that biodiversity loss.
There is also a limited amount of resources
that we can use to tackle those problems, and at the same
time there's a lot of competing, other problems that
we're trying to deal with around the world that
are taking up those same resources.
So we have a very challenging set of problems to
deal with in Australia, and we're trying to do it in
the best way possible, with the resources that we have at hand.
Amongst the threats to Australian biodiversity
there's two that are key, and that is habitat loss
and fragmentation and the introduction of exotic species.
In terms of managing those threats
there's many actions we can take, but the first
one is to remove the threat entirely.
So in terms of habitat loss, it's removing the
destruction of habitat, and for invasive species
it's preventing entry into Australia.
Other actions we can take for habitat loss includes restoration,
active restoration, putting vegetation
and animals backing into the landscape.
And in terms of invasive species we want to contain their
distribution once they come into Australia, and then if they
start to spread we want to control that spread.
There are many other threats facing Australia, livestock
grazing and misuse of fire are two other big ones.
Grazing affects over 80% of the Australian landscape,
and by managing stock density we can go a long way
towards maintaining biodiversity in these landscapes.
In terms of fire, fire frequencies have become
too frequent in many parts of the Australian landscape,
and also too extensive. So by understanding Aboriginal fire
regimes we're trying to get back to something
more in tune with what the fire regimes were prior
to European colonisation.
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Over the last ten years or so we've developed a lot
of techniques to help us make better decisions
in the face of this high level of uncertainty and resource
constraints, and we call this process of decision
making called structured decision making.
There's a few key steps that we take when we're
using this process, and they are firstly to clearly
define the problem that we have.
The second thing we need to do is clearly articulate what actions
we're actually going to take. What can we do to protect
biodiversity in these different circumstances?
The next thing we need to do is ask ourselves,
well what's the actual benefit of taking that action?
If we, for example, are going to minimise grazing in a particular area,
what's going to be the benefit of that gazing response
on the plants and animals that we're trying to protect?
Finally, we need to think about what the resource constraints are.
Often we try and solve these problems without having
an understanding of the costs of undertaking the
different actions, and that's really like trying to
go shopping without price tags.
So we need to know how much money do we have to
deal with this particular problem, and how much
time do we have, what's the timeframe in terms of
solving this type of problem?
[Music plays]
We're using these methods of structured decision making
to solve some very tricky problems in Australia,
and they include how to recover our endangered species.
At the moment we have over 700 species listed
on the EPBC, that's the Environmental Protection
and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
We don't have enough resources to recover all of
those species, so we need to come up with a way of
actually deciding which ones we can recover for
the resources we have. So using this technique
is a very helpful way of doing that.
We can define the costs of taking the different actions,
we can define the benefits for each species of
taking these actions, and we can also look at the feasibility.
The reason why this approach has been so
successful is that we're essentially producing
a prospectus for investing in biodiversity.
And this is really useful when we're working with government agencies
and industry bodies in that we're able to say this is how much
biodiversity you're likely to conserve for this amount of money spent.
(Eddie Game) My name is Eddie Game.
I'm a Senior Scientist with the Nature Conservancy,
which is the world's largest conservation
non-government organisation. We work in about 45 countries
around the world on biodiversity conservation strategies.
In Australia we work in the Kimberley,
and we support conservation management in a number
of Indigenous protected areas.
This is the same place where CSIRO has been working to determine
the most cost effective approaches to managing our biodiversity.
We use CSIRO's products.
That's one of the big reasons why people support the
Nature Conservancy, is that we're really committed
to using science to determine the work we do.
And it's a big incentive for our supporters that
we're always looking for the most cost effective
approaches to biodiversity conservation.
In the Kimberley this turns out to be for us managing
fire regimes, managing cattle on those lands,
and also managing invasive herbivores.
[Music plays]
(Dr. Tara Martin) Many of the problems that we have right now
in terms of biodiversity conservation are very urgent,
and failure to make decisions in a timely way
will lead to extinction. In fact one of our most
recent extinctions was the Christmas Island Pipistrelle.
And that's a species that we had been
monitoring for quite a long time, but a failure to act
in time resulted in the extinction of that species.
We want to avoid that in the future.
We have the tools at hand to make decisions under huge
amounts of uncertainty. Australia is very well placed in
terms of managing its biodiversity because a lot of the
scientific expertise has been developed in this country.
So given the political will and the social appetite for
biodiversity conservation is there, we should do very
well in halting the decline of our biodiversity and
recovering the biodiversity that is already in decline.
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