Koala-detecting dogs sniff out flaws in Australia's threatened species protection
In a country like Australia - a rich, economically and politically stable country with multiple environmental laws and relatively effective governance - the public could be forgiven for assuming that environmental laws are effective in protecting threatened species.
But our new research, recently published in Animal Conservation, used koala detector dogs to find vulnerable koalas in places where developers thought they couldn't live. This highlights the shortcomings of environmental protections that favour efficiency over precision.
Environmental impact studies
Any new infrastructure project must undergo an environmental impact assessment (EIA) to determine whether it will affect an endangered species. If this is the case, the next logical step is to try to avoid this by redesigning the project.
But this rarely happens in reality, as we have seen recently for the endangered Black-throated Finch.
In most cases, when the EIA suggests an unavoidable impact, the answer is to identify mitigation and compensation measures, often in the form of "offsets". These are bands of comparable habitats that are supposed to "compensate" affected species for habitat lost as a result of development.
To take the example of koalas, developers who build houses may have to buy and obtain land to compensate for habitat loss. Or a new road may require fences and underpasses to allow koalas to cross roads safely (or under roads).
These steps are defined in the environmental regulations and depend on the results of the initial EIA.
A question of assumptions
As the number of koalas continues to decline, we examined whether the current EIA guidelines were adequate.
For an EIA to be effective, it is essential that the environmental impact of future development can be properly anticipated and therefore managed. First, the impact of the project on threatened species is quantified through ecological surveys of the presence and extent of threatened species within the project footprint.
There are government guidelines to prescribe how these ecological surveys are conducted. Each project is subject to time and budget constraints, so the survey guidelines are designed to accurately determine the presence of species.
Therefore, the Australian guidelines recommend that inventory efforts be concentrated where there is a high probability of finding a species of special concern for the project. It seemed very logical - until we started to test the underlying assumptions.
We used a very precise survey method - detection dogs - to locate koala excrement, and thus identify koala habitat, throughout the footprint of the proposed projects in Queensland. We did not focus our efforts in areas where we expected them to be successful, which excludes bias in other surveys.
Unpredictable koalas
We found that koalas did not always behave as expected. By targeting efforts on certain areas, the "likely" habitat of the koala, in an attempt to increase efficiency, there was a risk of losing koala hot spots.
In particular, the use of landscape koalas is intensely modified by human activity. Koalas, like us, like us, like to live on the coast and in the rich alluvial plains. This means that we found them unexpectedly in the middle of urban areas, along roads that - because they have the last remaining trees in dense agricultural landscapes - now act (counter-intuitively) like corridors.
Assumptions about where koala live can significantly underestimate the impact of new infrastructure. In one case study, the habitat defined by the recommended survey methods was about 50 times smaller than the size of the habitat actually affected.
If surveys are missing or underestimate koala habitat while attempting to measure the impact of development, we cannot expect to adequately avoid, mitigate or compensate for damage. If the first step fails, the rest of the process is inevitably compromised. And this is bad news for koalas, among many other endangered species.
All parts of the landscape are important
What is needed is a paradigm shift. In a world where humans have affected every ecosystem on the planet, we cannot focus solely on protecting pristine and high quality areas for our threatened species. We can no longer afford to rely on assumptions.
This may seem like a significant and therefore costly demand. Yet ecosystems are a common resource that belongs to all of us, and those seeking to exploit these common goods should bear the cost of demonstrating that they understand (and can therefore mitigate) their impact.
The alternative is to risk that society will have to assume the environmental debt, as we have seen with abandoned mines.
The burden of proof should be squarely on the project proponent to thoroughly study the impact of the project.
This is the problem - project promoters are subject to time and budget constraints that push them to seek efficiency gains. In this fierce struggle, the main losers are generally threatened species. We argue that this cannot continue, because for many endangered species, there is not much room for error.
Environmental regulations that define survey requirements must give priority to accuracy over efficiency.
A review of Australia's main environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, is scheduled to begin in October this year. We ask the government to take this opportunity to ensure that threatened species are truly protected during development.
