Impact of Australian bush fires on its wildlife
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Explanation:Nearly 3 billion animals were killed or displaced by Australia’s devastating bushfire season of 2019 and 2020, according to scientists who have revealed for the first time the scale of the impact on the country’s native wildlife.
The Guardian has learned that an estimated 143 million mammals, 180 million birds, 51 million frogs and a staggering 2.5 billion reptiles were affected by the fires that burned across the continent. Not all the animals would have been killed by the flames or heat, but scientists say the prospects of survival for those that had withstood the initial impact was “probably not that great” due to the starvation, dehydration and predation by feral animals – mostly cats – that followed.
An interim report based on work by 10 scientists from five institutions, commissioned by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), suggests the toll from the fires goes much further than an earlier estimate of more than 1 billion animals killed.
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What is the After the Bushfires series?
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Scientists from the University of Sydney, University of New South Wales, University of Newcastle, Charles Sturt University and Birdlife Australia contributed to the study.
Dermot O’Gorman, WWF-Australia’s chief executive, said: “It’s hard to think of another event anywhere in the world in living memory that has killed or displaced that many animals. This ranks as one of the worst wildlife disasters in modern history.”
Bob Semmens checks for birds in one of the burnt coast forests where he has been conducting surveys for decades.
Australia after the bushfires
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Chris Dickman, a professor in ecology at the University of Sydney and fellow of the Australian Academy of Science who oversaw the project, said its central finding was a shock even to the researchers. “Three thousand million native vertebrates is just huge. It’s a number so big that you can’t comprehend it,” he said. “It’s almost half the human population of the planet.”
Dickman said the project showed the impact of the fires was much greater than the devastating loss of koalas, which became the public face of the disaster to international audiences. Many of the reptiles affected were smaller species, such as skinks, that can live in densities of more than 1,500 individuals per hectare.
'We're helpless': thousands of koalas probably dead after wildfires – video
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'We're helpless': thousands of koalas probably dead after wildfires – video
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Lead researcher Lily van Eeden, of the University of Sydney, said the study was the first to attempt a continent-wide assessment of the impact of bushfires on animals. The analysis is based on a burned zone of 11.46m hectares (28.31m acres), an area nearly the size of England. It includes about 8.5m hectares of forest, mostly in the southeast and southwest but including 120,000 hectares of northern rainforest.
The study showed the extent to which megafires were reducing the country’s biodiversity, and underlined the need to address the climate crisis and stop the clearing of land for agriculture and development, said Dickman.
A supplied image obtained on Tuesday, January 14, 2020, shows two Glossy Black-Cockatoos. Conservations and scientists fear the impact of unprecedented bushfires on Australian plants and animals will be catastrophic. (AAP Image/Supplied by BirdLife Australia, Dean Ingwersen) NO ARCHIVING, EDITORIAL USE ONLY
Fledgling 0601: the baby cockatoo that rose from the ashes of Australia's bushfires
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“We really need to start thinking about how we can rein in this demonic genie that’s out of the bottle,” he said, referring to climate change. “We need to be looking at how quickly can we decarbonise, how quickly can we stop our manic land-clearing.”
A dead native bird washed up amongst ash and fire debris on Boydtown Beach, Eden.
A dead native bird washed up among ash and fire debris on Boydtown Beach, Eden. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/Reuters
Since the late 1980s Australian scientists have been warning that adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere would increase bushfire risk. An analysis in March found the risk of the kind of hot and dry conditions that helped drive Australia’s catastrophic fires had increased by a factor of more than four since 1900, and would be eight times more likely if global heating above pre-industrial levels reached 2C.
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