Numbat Bounces Back as Australia Faces Extinction Emergency
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- Numbat populations at Dryandra Woodland in Western Australia have recovered enough to be removed from the international red list of threatened species, after Tony Friend arrived in the 1980s to find fewer than 50 remaining there.
- Australia leads the world in mammal extinctions and has lost roughly four species every decade, with researchers confident at least 100 plant and animal species are gone forever despite the official government list sitting at 67.
- Threats catalogued by the article include habitat clearing for farming, mining and timber, invasive pests (fire ants, cane toads, foxes, feral cats), chlamydia devastating koalas, chytrid fungus driving seven frog extinctions, and the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires that killed an estimated three billion animals.
- Labor government under Albanese took office in 2022 promising no new extinctions, passed revamped environment laws last year, and set a 2030 target to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, but the substance — National Environmental Standards and a federal watchdog — is still being developed.
- Robert Hill, Australia's longest-serving environment minister, told the BBC that successive governments including his own have failed to adequately protect the environment over the past 30 years, saying "We should have done more too."
- More than 80% of Australia's plant and animal species are endemic, meaning they exist nowhere else, and ecologist Jack Pascoe of the Yuin Aboriginal nation warned that their loss would devastate First Nations culture, food production, tourism and potential medical and agricultural breakthroughs.
- Perth Zoo's breeding programme is releasing numbats at Dryandra to boost genetic diversity, though many other threatened species can only survive in fenced reserves due to uncontrolled feral predators.
Why it matters: More than 80% of Australia's species are found nowhere else on Earth, making its extinction trajectory a global — not just national — loss. The Albanese government's 2030 target and revamped environment laws remain untested scaffolding: even Robert Hill, who led the last major reforms in 1999, says 30 years of political will has been lacking. Without enforcement mechanisms, a country with world-leading scientists continues leading the world in mammal extinctions.
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