Agriculture and the natural environment have stark differences that warrant distinctive approaches to biosecurity. Environmental biosecurity cannot just be bolted on to industry biosecurity.
These are points the Invasive Species Council is making as a response to the ‘One Biosecurity’ concept signalling a national intent to adopt a seamless cross-sectoral, cross-jurisdictional approach to invasive species threats to Australia’s environment, industry and public health.
The One Biosecurity integration adopted by all Australian governments (following the 2008 Beale review) is essential in a federal system, with biosecurity functions spread across three levels of government under numerous laws and policies, and with invasive threats having a multitude of pathways and drivers.
Many invasive species have both economic and environmental impacts, and sometimes social impacts as well, warranting a joint approach. However, Australia’s biosecurity system was established primarily to protect agriculture and is managed primarily by agricultural agencies.
The dominant culture and concepts in biosecurity have been born from agriculture.
Conservation requires a biosecurity focus on hundreds of thousands of species, from microbes to macropods, and their interactions that constitute ecosystems and ecosystem processes in terrestrial, freshwater and marine systems.
In contrast, industry biosecurity is mostly focused on protecting individual species that are of economic value and number no more than a few dozen (except for the nursery and aquarium industries, which use a wider although largely replaceable range of species).
The values at stake for industry are quantifiable in economic terms and are sometimes replaceable (by new breeds, species or enterprises). The values at stake in conservation are not replaceable – each species and ecosystem is important – and cannot be quantified in economic terms. This means they are often undervalued when biosecurity priorities are decided.
Because of the diversity of taxa and ecological communities to protect, there are far more invasive species that are of threat to environmental values, far too many to compile into a target list.
Both environmental and industry threats mostly derive from global and domestic commerce, but a greater proportion of environmental threats are deliberate imports because of their economic or social value. Environmental threats are typically far more complex, involving direct and indirect impacts arising from biotic and abiotic interactions.
For example, the threat to industry of myrtle rust consists of direct impacts on particular cultivated species (native forestry is the exception) but in the environment it consists of impacts on susceptible species as well as dependent wildlife, ecosystems and ecosystem processes such as fire regimes.
The impacts of Asian honeybees on industry will be reduced crop pollination services and honey production because of competition with European honeybees.
In the environment, Asian honeybees will compete with the pollinators of unknown numbers of plants with flow-on impacts on the unknown numbers of species relying on these plants.
Much more is known about cultivated species and the invasive threats to them than about biodiversity and invasive threats.
The lack of knowledge about our native biota, particularly invertebrates and microbes, means that most invasive species impacts are not documented or monitored.
As Burgman and co-researchers (2009) say of fungi, ‘far less than about 10 per cent of species scientifically documented… Many … arrive each year. It may be many years before their effects are felt in Australian ecosystems. As a consequence, lists of potentially damaging invaders rarely make reference to fungi.’ Invasive earthworms can have dramatic impacts on soil properties and plant composition but scant interest has been paid to the more than 60 exotic species in Australia (Woodman et al. 2008).
The impacts of even high-profile species are poorly known. Development of the NSW threat abatement plan for bitou bush increased the number of known species at risk from six to 158 (Coutts-Smith & Downey 2006). Because of the vast pool of potential invasive species, including many about which little is known, it is not possible to develop advance guidelines for the eradication of incursions, except for a small subset of species.
While impacts on cultivated species can be predicted with reasonable accuracy, there are high levels of uncertainty about impacts in the natural environment due to complex interactions, long timeframes (millennia) and lack of knowledge.
Many impacts are facilitated by or synergistic with other threats, such as fragmentation and climate change. Invasive impacts in the natural environment may not be observed for decades due to lag effects, lack of monitoring or their insidious nature.
A cow killed by a new pathogen is much more easily detected than a dead bird in a forest. The combination of great uncertainties, long timeframes and limited management options warrants an especially precautionary and defensive approach in environmental biosecurity.
There are many more management options in relatively simple, delimited agricultural systems than there are in complex natural environments.
For example, in response to myrtle rust, plant industries can use fungicides, breed resistant varieties or use tolerant species, none of which are options in the natural environment.
Weeds cannot be controlled with broadacre mechanical or chemical control in many natural situations. Australia’s post-border biosecurity (managed by the states and territories) is more reactive rather than defensive, with the focus mostly on controlling or proscribing a small subset of listed invasive species that are causing proven harm.
A much more precautionary approach is warranted because of the limited options for control once a species is established.
There are commercial incentives for industry management of invasive species but environmental biosecurity relies on government and community investment for the public good.
Commercial incentives and greater government spending also mean that industry biosecurity is much better resourced than environmental biosecurity. When funding cuts occur, environmental biosecurity suffers more than industry biosecurity.
And when incursions of major economic pests occur, environmental biosecurity is often compromised by the diversion of staff to deal with agricultural incursions. When biosecurity agencies are dominated by agricultural experts there can be cultural barriers to environmental biosecurity.
A multitude of stakeholders, often with conflicting agendas, makes environmental biosecurity a much more socially and politically challenging policy area than industry biosecurity. Some of the most damaging environmental invaders are ignored because of economic or social reasons that are rarely subject to cost-benefit analysis – many aquarium fish, pasture grasses and garden plants for example.
In 2012 ISC developed ‘Keeping Nature Safe’, a proposal for the establishment of Environment Health Australia, a national body dedicated to environmental biosecurity.
In 2012 ISC prepared a paper, Engaging the Environmental Community Sector on Biosecurity, for the federal Biosecurity Advisory Council. The paper outlines the benefits and costs of community engagement in decision-making and policy-setting in environmental biosecurity, assesses the current state of engagement at the national level and makes six recommendations for engagement reform.
The Invasive Species Council acknowledges the Traditional Custodians throughout Australia and their connections to land and sea. We pay our respect to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. The Invasive Species Council supports voting ‘YES’ for a Voice to Parliament.
Dear Project Team,
[YOUR PERSONALISED MESSAGE WILL APPEAR HERE.]
I support the amendment to the Kosciuszko National Park Wild Horse Heritage Management Plan to allow our incredible National Parks staff to use aerial shooting as one method to rapidly reduce feral horse numbers. I want to see feral horse numbers urgently reduced in order to save the national park and our native wildlife that live there.
The current approach is not solving the problem. Feral horse numbers have rapidly increased in Kosciuszko National Park to around 18,000, a 30% jump in just the past 2 years. With the population so high, thousands of feral horses need to be removed annually to reduce numbers and stop our National Park becoming a horse paddock. Aerial shooting, undertaken humanely and safely by professionals using standard protocols, is the only way this can happen.
The government’s own management plan for feral horses states that ‘if undertaken in accordance with best practice, aerial shooting can have the lowest negative animal welfare impacts of all lethal control methods’.
This humane and effective practice is already used across Australia to manage hundreds of thousands of feral animals like horses, deer, pigs, and goats.
Trapping and rehoming of feral horses has been used in Kosciuszko National Park for well over a decade but has consistently failed to reduce the population, has delayed meaningful action and is expensive. There are too many feral horses in the Alps and not enough demand for rehoming for it to be relied upon for the reduction of the population.
Fertility control as a management tool is only effective for a small, geographically isolated, and accessible population of feral horses where the management outcome sought is to maintain the population at its current size. It is not a viable option to reduce the large and growing feral horse population in the vast and rugged terrain of Kosciuszko National Park.
Feral horses are trashing and trampling our sensitive alpine ecosystems and streams, causing the decline and extinction of native animals. The federal government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee has stated that feral horses ‘may be the crucial factor that causes final extinction’ for 12 alpine species.
I recognise the sad reality that urgent and humane measures are necessary to urgently remove the horses or they will destroy the Snowies and the native wildlife that call the mountains home. I support a healthy national park where native species like the Corroboree Frog and Mountain Pygmy Possum can thrive.
Dear Project Team,
[YOUR PERSONALISED MESSAGE WILL APPEAR HERE.]
I support the amendment to the Kosciuszko National Park Wild Horse Heritage Management Plan to allow our incredible National Parks staff to use aerial shooting as one method to rapidly reduce feral horse numbers. I want to see feral horse numbers urgently reduced in order to save the national park and our native wildlife that live there.
The current approach is not solving the problem. Feral horse numbers have rapidly increased in Kosciuszko National Park to around 18,000, a 30% jump in just the past 2 years. With the population so high, thousands of feral horses need to be removed annually to reduce numbers and stop our National Park becoming a horse paddock. Aerial shooting, undertaken humanely and safely by professionals using standard protocols, is the only way this can happen.
The government’s own management plan for feral horses states that ‘if undertaken in accordance with best practice, aerial shooting can have the lowest negative animal welfare impacts of all lethal control methods’.
This humane and effective practice is already used across Australia to manage hundreds of thousands of feral animals like horses, deer, pigs, and goats.
Trapping and rehoming of feral horses has been used in Kosciuszko National Park for well over a decade but has consistently failed to reduce the population, has delayed meaningful action and is expensive. There are too many feral horses in the Alps and not enough demand for rehoming for it to be relied upon for the reduction of the population.
Fertility control as a management tool is only effective for a small, geographically isolated, and accessible population of feral horses where the management outcome sought is to maintain the population at its current size. It is not a viable option to reduce the large and growing feral horse population in the vast and rugged terrain of Kosciuszko National Park.
Feral horses are trashing and trampling our sensitive alpine ecosystems and streams, causing the decline and extinction of native animals. The federal government’s Threatened Species Scientific Committee has stated that feral horses ‘may be the crucial factor that causes final extinction’ for 12 alpine species.
I recognise the sad reality that urgent and humane measures are necessary to urgently remove the horses or they will destroy the Snowies and the native wildlife that call the mountains home. I support a healthy national park where native species like the Corroboree Frog and Mountain Pygmy Possum can thrive.