The Australian Government invests in building community resilience to natural disasters and supporting recovery. What should we expect of our governments when it’s native wildlife facing catastrophe?
H5 bird flu has taken 30 years to reach Australia. Emerging from the crowded cities and farms of southern China, it recently reached the crowded colonies of seals and seabirds on remote specks of land in the Southern Ocean. After killing three-quarters of the elephant seal pups on Heard Island, an Australian world heritage territory, the virus has now jumped more than 4,000 kilometres to the mainland.
On its journey to Australia, it has wiped out uncounted millions of wild birds and tens of thousands of mammals. For some species, recovery will take decades or not at all.
Having already affected some 600 bird species and 100 mammal species around the world, it has now arrived in a land rich in new, immunologically naive hosts.
This globe-trotting, shape-shifting microscopic killer is an unstoppable threat to Australian wildlife. A mere 10 proteins and 8 RNA segments encapsulated in a lipid membrane, it takes over a host’s cellular processes to churn out millions of copies of itself, ceaselessly mutating and swapping genetic segments to create new immune-evading variants.
When heartbreaking images of dead Australian birds and mammals strewn across beaches and wetlands flash across our screens, Australians will demand our governments do more than monitor the losses.
Once established in the wild, the virus cannot be eliminated or treated in wildlife. So, what can be done?
The Australian Government invests heavily in building the resilience of human communities to natural disasters, on the basis that it is much more cost-effective to fund mitigation and resilience work than just respond after a disaster.
That same logic should apply to wildlife. Rather than just waiting to try to recover species after disease outbreaks, our governments should be urgently doing as much as possible to boost their resilience now.
That means mitigating the other threats already battering their populations – invasive species, habitat loss and degradation, destructive fire regimes, loss of natural water flows – to increase their capacity to survive and recover from bird flu outbreaks.
The Australian Government has recognised the importance of this, with Environment Minister Murray Watt saying recently that the ‘best way’ to protect susceptible species ‘is to have strong and healthy populations’ – which means ‘work repairing habitat and managing threats like weeds, feral cats, foxes and pigs is more important than ever’.
We applaud recent resilience projects funded by the Australian Government, such as the eradication of rats from Deliverance Island in the Torres Strait to protect migratory birds, the treatment of hookworm infections in Australian sea lion pups, and the removal of weeds from magpie geese habitat.
But this effort needs substantial scaling up, for there are many more susceptible species under enormous pressure from multiple other threats – many of which could be eliminated or minimised.
Recent plans to allow widespread parrot imports – along with potential deadly new pathogens – are just one example of threats we can control and avoid.
Environment groups are calling on the Albanese Government for an initial urgent $200 million, 2-year investment in wildlife resilience, with additional funding from state and territory governments.
The Australian Government doesn’t need persuading of the logic. Unable to stop floods, fires and cyclones, it established the billion-dollar Disaster Ready Fund to strengthen the ‘resilience, adaptability, and preparedness’ of communities in their path.
Unable to stop bird flu, it can do the same for wildlife.
What’s missing isn’t the rationale. It’s accepting that Australians want this for our wildlife too – for just $13 a taxpayer, to better enable our most vulnerable species to survive and recover from a disease nothing can stop.
Dr Carol Booth, Invasive Species Council Policy Director
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