Saving Australia’s threatened wildlife, repairing degraded land and restoring ailing river systems is possible and would cost just 0.3% of Australia’s GDP, according to a new blueprint produced by more than 60 experts.
For the first time scientists, governance and business leaders have produced a dollar estimate of what it would take to fix Australia’s environment.
They set out 24 actions which, if followed, could “avoid most extinctions and recover almost all threatened species”, repair the productive base of agricultural soils and fix over-allocated and fragmented river systems.
The dollar figure – $7.3bn annually for the next 30 years – is less than two-thirds of the federal government’s reported annual expenditure on fossil fuel subsidies.
“The cost is less than 0.3% of our GDP. Given that nearly half of our GDP depends on nature, that’s a pretty sound investment,” the University of Queensland professor Martine Maron told the National Press Club on Wednesday.
She said Australia’s spectacular and unique landscapes and beloved wildlife were a drawcard for domestic and international tourists alike, bringing billions of dollars into the Australian economy every year.
But she said many Australians did not realise that “all of this is genuinely under threat”.
“You’re all familiar with the ASX? Well, we have an index that tracks how our threatened species are going too,” she said.
“It’s called the TSX – the Threatened Species Index – and it shows that populations of our threatened species have declined 60% since 2000.”
The blueprint puts forward a national case for repairing degraded landscapes and taking practical action at a continental scale.