SUGGESTED READING # 5

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Green = tenses

Koala factcheck: have the Australian bushfires put survival of the species at stake?

26 Nov 2019 The Guardian

Hundreds of koalas have been killed and millions of hectares of their habitat destroyed in the bushfires that have swept across parts of Australia this month.

A recent headline in Forbes alleged the fires had rendered koalas “functionally extinct”, a claim that was repeated widely in Australia and overseas.

The claim, which originated from a release in May by the Australian Koala Foundation, has been criticised by koala experts and science commentators for overstating the plight of the popular marsupial.

Koala populations are in trouble, but this is due to a gradual process of deforestation over many years. This has been made worse by the recent fires, but the full scale of the damage is not yet known.

Stuart Blanch from WWF Australia says if a population is no longer genetically viable, koalas could be said to be “functionally extinct” in some areas.

“But there are large areas of large numbers of koalas that are still viable,” he says. “And they are our hope. We absolutely believe there is hope to stop koalas going extinct.”
But Blanch and the WWF fear koalas are heading towards extinction by 2050 if the destruction of their habitat continues.
“Largely what is driving the koala to extinction is deforestation,” he says. “The climate-heating impacts of drought and bushfires and declining water availability is making that trend worse in some areas.”
Blanch says the full scale of this month’s bushfires is not yet known, although news reports have referred to fears that hundreds of koalas may have died.

Koala populations across Queensland and NSW fell 42% between 1990 and 2010, according to the federal threatened species scientific committee.

James Tremain, a spokesman for the NSW Nature Conservation Council, says koala decline has been happening “slowly and silently”.

“Koala numbers have plunged over the past 20 years and if we don’t turn the trend around they won’t be ‘functionally extinct’, they will be actually extinct,” he says.