‘What would Australia be like without koalas?’ Conservationists say extinction perilously close

Australia’s biggest koala conservation group says government estimates on koalas are so inaccurate that urgent action is needed to avoid a national catastrophe.

Australian Koala Foundation (AKF) chief executive Deborah Tabart said numbers had plummeted to as low as 50,000, leaving the iconic animal perilously close to extinction.

“We believe that the federal government has overestimated koala numbers by about 10 times the actual number,” Ms Tabart said.

“We believe that there are less than 80,000 animals left in the wild — it’s probably more like 50,000.

“I personally believe that our government doesn’t have a handle on how they are going to recover this species.”

Rapid decline

Koalas are listed as vulnerable in Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT, but conservation groups are pushing for them to be re-categorised as endangered.

WWF (formerly World Wildlife Fund) estimates 60,000 koalas were impacted by the 2019–20 bushfires alone.

But WWF-Australia chief executive Dermot O’Gorman said koalas in NSW and Queensland were in rapid decline long before the fires.

“Koalas were once more widespread than they are now, covering a large area in the east of the country,” he said.

“Shooting, fire, and deforestation are thought to have led to a decline in numbers, particularly in Queensland where, in 1927, 10,000 licensed trappers collected 600,000 koala skins.”

A survey conducted in parts of Queensland in 1967 found koalas had disappeared from 37 per cent of sites surveyed.

‘Desktop figures’

States also have their own protection plans to try to arrest the declining numbers.

Ms Tabart said, due to climate change and the 2019–20 bushfires, koala numbers were worse than previously reported.

“We have scientists at 2,000 field sites across Australia and we have spent nearly $20 million mapping habitats,” Ms Tabart said.

“They [governments] are using desktops to come up with those figures.”

Bill Ellis, a research fellow at the School of Agriculture and Food Sciences at the University of Queensland, has been studying koala numbers since the 1990s.

“There are definitely fewer animals here than when we started, but fortunately they do seem to be persisting.”

It was not just the population of koalas that was diminishing, but also their distribution, a problem Dr Ellis put down to a combination of factors.

“It’s not just the bushfires, there’s also drought and habitat clearing,” he said.

“The best example is out in the Mulga Lands; there used to be sizeable koala populations.

“There are now a lot of holes in the distribution map, in some places west of Rockhampton we have seen populations decline to almost non-existent.”

Dr Ellis said it was the second time koalas have faced extinction since the arrival of Europeans in Australia.

“One hundred years ago, the fur trade nearly wiped out the species,” he said.

“If the fur trade did continue, koalas would have vanished, because we know that in some areas where they were wiped out, they never came back.”

Last year, the federal government announced an $18 million koala specific package that included new projects to protect populations by improving key habitats, improving health research, and monitoring populations.

A spokesperson from the Department of Environment and Science said the amount included a $2 million Australia-wide census being implemented by the CSIRO to better inform and direct conservation efforts.

The package also included a first-of-its-kind koala genome mapping program through Sydney University and more than $14 million of investments in the protection of koala-specific habitat.

Public help

September is Save the Koala month, a campaign Ms Tabart launched 33 years ago to raise public awareness and funds for the plight of the national mascot.

“[AKF] wouldn’t exist without public support because we take no government money,” she said.

“The whole world is in flux at the moment and I think all charities are under enormous pressure.

“Koala forests in Australia play a vital role in maintaining CO2 levels — trees breath in CO2 and breath out oxygen.

“I sometimes think our political leaders have forgotten that.”