However well you know your ‘home patch’, there are bound to be people with far greater knowledge and insight. In my home patch, which includes places such as Royal, Heathcote and Kamay Botany Bay National Parks, there are folk whose understanding of the local species just leaves me in wonder.
A few days ago I saw a social media post from one such individual, a person who runs tours to teach birding skills. They were commenting about a client’s disinterest in New Holland Honeyeaters because they were a common sight in Royal National Park. I found myself furiously agreeing with her defence of the species as behaviourally fascinating and incredibly important in the coastal heathlands and forests.
I often reflect about the emphasis on the rare and threatened species in conservation debates. Think about the number of times you’ve been told that a place is important because it contains a particular threatened species. It’s almost as though, in the absence of a species on the precipice of extinction, natural habitats and the species they contain have no value.
Now it does makes sense to consider species at risk of extinction, and if we want to stop biodiversity loss there are certainly arguments for prioritising measures to protect the most vulnerable species.
There are well established processes for determining whether a species warrants statutory listing as threatened, and, at least in NSW, rigorous methods for assessing the likelihood of any particular development pushing a species over the extinction threshold.
The legal status of listed species has meant that, for development control purposes, the severity of impacts on threatened species or ecological communities has become the only part of the environmental impact assessment process that is given serious consideration by approval authorities. Questions such as the severity of impact on common species, or loss habitat connectivity, or even the cumulative impacts of successive developments, are all largely ignored.
I can’t help wondering whether there is an element of Stockholm syndrome in the way we have conflated conservation value with the presence of rare and threatened. It is what Councils, approval authorities, and even the courts regard as important, so it must be the only aspect of natural heritage that is important.
Maybe it’s time to think more broadly about what makes places important. When preparing proposals for new parks we do need to think about how they act as a barrier to future extinctions. That doesn’t mean simply assessing the extent to which they protect the known habitats of threatened species – we also need to think about the role of protected areas in stopping common species from sliding towards threatened status. That transition can take place shockingly quickly; remember how quickly the 2019/20 fires changed the status of previously secure species?
Thankfully there are well established international and national guidelines for assessing the benefits of proposed conservation reserves. They include the familiar Comprehensive, Adequate and Representative principles at the bioregional scale, but also include connectivity, resilience, maintenance of large-scale ecosystem processes and the capacity to sequester and store carbon.
This edition of Nature NSW introduces a new reserve project NPA has launched for the Southern Forests of NSW. The project involves an exhaustive assessment of the full range of conservation attributes, not just threatened species. It is based on the premise that all species need adequate protection, and that it is only by protecting common species and their habitats that we avoid them becoming the threatened species of the future.
Planning for the future of the full range of biodiversity is within our control and capacity when it comes to the next generation of Protected Areas. Bringing that same perspective to the loss of habitat as part of development and agricultural activities is going to be a much bigger challenge….
In This Edition
- Thinking big, the next phase in campaigning for our Southern Forests
- The NSW biodiversity outlook report 2024 has just been released
- Shark nets a false sense of security
- Photographing the Annual Humpback Migration
- Nature Kids Behind the scenes
- What are OECMS?
- Wombats have an important role in helping our forest wildlife recover from megafires
- Book Review: The Heartbeat of Trees: Embracing our ancient bond with forests and nature
- Book Review: What the Trees See: a wander through millennia of natural history in Australia
View articles online: http://www.naturenswonline.org.au