Environment News 28.10.14 Part IV: The Outback is just as important as Amazon or Sahara - Says Pew - maybe mining the guts out of it aint so sustainable? The Pew Charitable Trusts have just finished a study assessing and mapping remote Australia – or the Outback – on the basis of explicit criteria including how far some of these places are from major centres, how intact their natural environments are, how many people are living there, how fertile the soils are and what sort of productivity is possible in these regions. They found, as expected, that these places – some 5.6m sq., km of the monsoonal north and the semi-arid fringes - DO face numerous challenges - one of the worst extinction records in the world, ongoing biodiversity declines, and neglect - but, they also suggested that there ARE also many opportunities, especially for the mostly indigenous people living in this vast expanse (some 73% of Australia’s landmass). “We need to re-imagine how conservation works, and how we live in this land.” Says the Trust’s report. “Though large national parks were established to protect and provide access to tourist icons, to conserve threatened species and to represent the diversity of vegetation types, they continue to lose components of their biodiversity because they weren’t designed to look after the ecological processes that underpin biodiversity — the continental-scale ebb and flow of species dispersing to track shifting resources, the interplay of drought and flood, the large-scale workings of fire regimes, the metastatic spread of weeds and pests throughout our land.” Said the report. “If we want to retain our extraordinary and distinctive wildlife, we need to break conservation out from beyond the bounds of National Parks to think and manage far larger landscapes.” It says. Our rate of biodiversity loss is clear evidence, they say, that we have not yet learnt to fit into our land. “We are living unsustainably and, the way that we have been managing our wildlife resources is not working - we need to think differently.” Says the Trust which went on to explain that research by the Wildlife Conservation Society has shown that the Australian outback is one of a handful of very large natural areas remaining on Earth, along with the boreal forests and tundra, the Amazon Basin and the Sahara. “These are the places that are most likely to maintain biodiversity over long time periods; that will allow ecological processes to operate over large scales, and because of this, the Outback is of international significance, far above that of simply the sum of its iconic tourist attractions.” Says the Trust which then went on to outline some of the profound and pervasive problems – like huge mining ventures - that are currently eroding that value, and that will extinguish such opportunity. “Rather than being a monotonous wasteland, it is a country full of meaning and value, with a delicate and intricate web of interconnections between places and people and, as a result, it would help to increase the number and area of Indigenous Protected Areas (IPAs).” (These are voluntary agreements by Aboriginal land-owners to manage their lands for environmental and cultural objectives. There are now more than 35 IPAs in the outback, covering an area of over 500,000 sq., km.) “Research has shown that IPAs produce impressive environmental outcomes, largely because there provide an organised group of people resourced to manage pests, weeds and fire over large areas in a strategic manner, using a combination of traditional and modern approaches and knowledge.” Says the report adding that these this program could offer a foundation for a better future for the Outback. theconversation/why-australias-outback-is-globally-important-32938
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 22:37:01 +0000
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