An exceptional environment
Australia's nature is one of its greatest attractions. Due to the great climatic diversity of the country, it is home to scenery ranging from rainforests with tropical species to the mountain meadows of the Australian Alps, from the Spinifex (porcupine grass) of the great deserts of central Australia to the dense forests of the southern coast of Western Australia and Tasmania. The geographical isolation of the country has led to a high rate of endemic species: more than 90% of the amphibians and reptiles that inhabit the country are found only here. This is also the case for 70% of mammals and even 45% of birds. Australian waters are also home to an incredible biodiversity: the Great Barrier Re ef of course, but not only. The Ningaloo Reef off Western Australia is also a sanctuary for marine species, including the famous whale sharks. Six of the seven species of sea turtles in the world frequent Australian waters.
Half a thousand national parks
This unique flora and fauna is protected by some 500 national parks, which together represent 4% of Australia's territory, or 28 million hectares: from the desert to the rainforest, including creeks and lagoons.
Western Australia is home to a hundred parks, and the wildest territories of the country, such as the Bungle Bungle National Park, accessible only by 4×4. Its lunar landscape is studded with zebra-shaped sandstone domes. Numerous species live in the park, including an endemic lizard that took its name: the Lerista bunglebungle.
Much more wooded, the Kakadu National Park is the largest in Australia. Very famous for the ancestral aboriginal culture that it shelters, it is also remarkable by its natural heritage. It is made of billabongs, typically Australian river meanders, which are full of crocodiles!
Closer to Sydney, the Kosciuszko National Park presents snowy landscapes that many people do not imagine in Australia, and which even allow skiing! Mount Kosciuszko, the highest peak in the country, at 2,228 m, allows alpine plant species to grow in the middle of Australia. Rare and endemic animal species also live there, such as the dwarf mountain possum(Burramys parvus), which looks like a small mouse.
A troubled environmental policy
Despite its environmental riches, Australia's environmental policies have often been controversial.
Nine years of policy led by the openly climate-skeptical conservative right have had a definite impact. It all began in 2013, when Liberal Tony Abbott came to power. He immediately set the La in environmental policy, scrapping several advances made by his predecessors, such as the Climate Change Authority and the Climate Commission. He cancelled the carbon tax, which had been introduced only a year earlier, even though the country is one of the world's biggest producers of carbon. With regard to biodiversity, the Prime Minister asked UNESCO to remove 74,000 hectares of temperate forest in Tasmania from the World Heritage List, so that it could be exploited.
In 2018, another Conservative, Scott Morrison, takes over the reins of government. As wildfires ravage the country, he will be sharply criticized for his disregard for environmental policies and his desire to continue coal mining, of which Australia is the world's biggest exporter. As protests erupted in major cities, and Australia came under pressure from its allies, the Prime Minister finally relented: Australia would be zero-carbon by 2050! But many members of his government, intimately involved with the coal industry, would have none of it. A few years earlier, a Liberal Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, was forced to resign after declaring his willingness to respect the Paris agreements. But that was too much: Scott Morrison turned back and announced that he would not be setting any carbon targets.
Finally, in May 2022, the election of Anthony Albanese, a Labor politician who represented a breath of fresh air for Australian ecology. In his victory speech, he announced his desire to make Australia a "renewable energy superpower". It remains to be seen what he will achieve, but there's no doubt that something has changed in Australian politics: witness the record number of representatives of theGreens in Parliament, as well as the numerous independent candidates, considered more centrist, with a strong environmental conscience: the teals, in reference to the "blue duck", a color mixing the green of the Greens and the blue of the right-wing Liberal Party.
When Australia goes up in smoke
While fires are a natural part of the Australian climate, their intensity, frequency and earliness are unprecedented, so much so that the risk of extreme fires has increased ninefold in a century! The fires of 2019, for example, started two months earlier than usual. In just a few months, 19 million hectares went up in smoke, taking a billion animals with them. There are many reasons for this: severe drought, increased deforestation making forests more fragile, and the omnipresence of eucalyptus trees, which make excellent fuel. One point on which all scientists agree: global warming is among the culprits.
Deadly fires have been multiplying in recent decades, and this episode, quickly dubbed Black Summer, follows on from many others, such as Ash Wednesday in 1983, or Black Saturday in 2009. However, in 2019, the heat went up another notch, and the fires were quickly considered Australia's worst, both in terms of their intensity and their exceptional duration of nine months, after which showers finally extinguished the embers.
The rain didn't stop the damage, however, and it continues to mount: Canberra and Melbourne have succeeded each other as the world's most polluted cities, potentially toxic phytoplankton have proliferated in the Tasman Sea, public health continues to deteriorate and Australia'sCO2 emissions have broken all records.
The continent facing drought
While the desert climate, which prevails in 70% of the country, is not to blame, climate disruption is largely responsible for the drought Australia has been experiencing since the early 2000s.
Despite this, Australians are the world's fourth largest per capita consumers of water. Two rivers bear the main responsibility for quenching the country's thirst: the Murray and the Darling. Overexploited, their water levels are very low, and look set to be even lower in the years to come. In 2006, Perth opened Australia's first seawater desalination plant, to take over during droughts. This energy-intensive initiative was quickly followed by others, notably in the Sydney area.
Since the early 2000s, when drought phenomena intensified, three quarters of Australians have been subject to restrictions on the use of drinking water, such as fines for filling swimming pools or watering lawns. However, these initiatives have a limited effect, since industry and agriculture account for 90% of water consumption. That's why, since 2004, the National Water Initiative has enabled the government to oversee water distribution, previously managed by the federal states, and to introduce more sustainable systems.
The Great Barrier Reef: from world heritage to heritage in danger?
The Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest reef, covers almost 350,000 km² in north-western Australia - an area almost the size of Germany. This makes it all the more difficult to imagine that it could disappear, consumed by three main dangers: global warming, predators and pollution.
Global warming is by far the greatest danger, as many of the reef's organisms are already living at the limit of their temperature tolerance. Each heat wave represents a bleaching episode for the coral, which, even if it can recover under favorable conditions, emerges greatly weakened, with losses of around 10% each time. Since 1998, there have been seven bleaching waves, affecting 98% of the reef.
Added to this is pollution, both from waste and agricultural discharge. Despite all this, the government has caused a scandal by approving the dumping of a million tons of mud near the fragile ecosystem in 2019. The sludge was the result of work carried out in an industrial port, and therefore contained heavy metals.
As if that weren't enough, a coral-eating starfish, the purple Acanthaster, is proliferating thanks to the pollution. A single one of these ferocious predators can devour 6 m² of coral in a year, so imagine 14,000 per km²! The result: researchers are so pessimistic about the future of the Great Barrier Reef that, since 2021, Unesco has put on the table a possible inscription of the Great Barrier Reef on the List of World Heritage in Danger.
The rich biodiversity in danger
Today, introduced species, often invasive, are a major threat to biodiversity. Cats, for example, have already caused the extinction of dozens of endemic species. Each of these predators kills so many animals a year that Australia is now conducting extermination campaigns. Meanwhile, the 24 rabbits introduced in 1874 now number 200 million, and are devastating local vegetation, so the government has introduced viruses and foxes to regulate these populations.
Introduced species are not, however, solely responsible for the pressures on biodiversity. The intensive hunting that took place over previous centuries, and the destruction of habitats through deforestation and pollution are all factors that endanger species that are sometimes emblematic, such as the koala, which has become vulnerable. Australia is also the continent with the highest number of extinct species. Tasmanian wolves, 20% of parakeet species and 30 of the 44 kangaroo species have all been delisted.
However, an absolutely historic step forward was taken in 2021: the management of an extremely rich forest was entrusted to the Aboriginal peoples. The Daintree National Park forest, the world's oldest tropical rainforest, is home to over 30,000 plant species, 107 mammals, 350 birds and 100 reptiles. This backtracking suggests happy days ahead for this forest, as it returns to ancestral methods far removed from the over-exploitation faced by today's ecosystems. The planting of a billion trees, planned by 2050 as part of the Paris Agreements, should also help to recreate ecosystems.
