Mongabay Newscast

Australia is one of 17 "megadiverse" countries that account for 70% of Earth's biodiversity. However, Australia is unique in having the highest mammalian extinction rate in the world. That makes conservation on the island continent, where most of the wildlife is found nowhere else on Earth, all the more urgent.
Conservation and environmental scientists have come out against the Australian federal government's claim that it's "on track" to meet most of its targets under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework agreed upon at the U.N. biodiversity summit in 2022. This week on the Mongabay Newscast, Euan Ritchie, a professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at Australia's Deakin University, and a councilor with the Biodiversity Council, an academic alliance in the country, argues why conservationists say the Australian government is failing its commitments.
"The short answer, unfortunately, is that Australia is doing terribly in terms of honoring its international obligations to meet those targets in the agreement. If we look at the number of threatened species in Australia, it's more than 2,200 now, and that list continues to increase," Ritchie says.
Despite being a relatively wealthy nation by gross domestic product per capita, Australia funds conservation at a diminutive scale compared to other industrialized countries. The latest annual budget allocates 0.06% of federal spending to nature. Ritchie and some 60 fellow experts suggest that it would only take about 1% of the federal budget to save most threatened species and restore soils and rivers. In 2024, the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists published its findings, which took six years to complete.
The Biodiversity Council has separately found that around 95% of Australians surveyed would support increased spending on the environment.
"Essentially, the federal government is ignoring a majority of Australians by not doing that," Ritchie says.
He argues the money to fund conservation already exists — or at least could easily exist by reducing subsidies for harmful industries (such as the fossil fuel industry), which currently amount to around A$26 billion ($19 billion) a year. Separately, a 25% tax on liquefied natural gas exports could generate A$17 billion ($12 billion) a year, a move nationwide polling suggests is supported by 70% of Australians.
Despite the perceived strong public support, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has ruled out a 25% tax on gas exports for the time being, which Ritchie says is very hard to understand, pointing to countries like Norway, which built its own sovereign wealth fund off similar measures. As of this writing, the Australian government has lost about A$70 billion ($50 billion) in revenue it could have collected had it taxed these resources, according to an online tracker by the Australia Institute, an independent think tank.
"We could bring in tens of billions of dollars in additional revenue if we taxed the resources that we are giving away, essentially in many cases for free," Ritchie says.
Instead of increasing direct conservation funding, the Australian government intends to close the gap by launching a "Nature Repair Market," a voluntary biodiversity offset scheme. It's essentially a way for industry and private investors to pay for the damage they cause. Research indicates this is unlikely to protect endangered wildlife and biodiversity without taxpayer funding. Other researchers from the University of Melbourne and the University of New South Wales have also weighed in, explaining that a biodiversity market is unlikely to work.
Ritchie says this is problematic for a number of other reasons, ranging from the complexity of biodiversity itself, to the way the government intends to measure environmental impacts from various projects. Currently, the national environmental standards in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) doesn't "account for cumulative impacts," Ritchie says.
"So if you imagine that you're a threatened species and you're widely distributed … Individual projects are not being assessed in relation to other projects that may also impact on that same species," he says. "So it is literally death by a thousand cuts."
Listen to a conversation on biodiversity offsets in Australia with Yung En Chee here.
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Image Credit: Black-flanked rock wallaby (Petrogale lateralis) in Cape Range National Park, Western Australia, Australia. The Australian government has classed the species as endangered under the EPBC Act. Image by Dsyzdek via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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Time codes
(00:00) 'Failing miserably' on the environment
(10:21) A 'Nature Repair Market' is not a solution
(23:47) New nature reform laws passed
(29:44) Plentiful sources of funding
(35:37) Native forest logging harms

"[The]cruel irony here [is] that the world cannot get its act together to address these threats … people are dying, animals are suffering, we're losing rainforest … these are all interconnected threats," Neil Vora tells me on this week's episode of the Mongabay Newscast, just a day after the World Health Organization (WHO) reported more than 80 deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo from an outbreak of the Ebola virus.
Vora is a former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) epidemic intelligence service officer who deployed to the DRC to combat Ebola. He says the current strain, the Bundibugyo virus, is particularly dangerous because there is no current approved treatment or vaccine for it. While neither this virus nor the Andes virus, a type of hantavirus that originated in Chile and Argentina and killed three people on a cruise ship, is likely to cause a pandemic, says Vora, he stresses member states of the WHO are unprepared to address a pandemic should one occur.
According to Vora, the WHO could have achieved a pandemic agreement to better address the threats pandemics pose. But that fell short when nations failed to adopt a system to equitably share tools such as vaccines.
" And now those discussions on the pandemic agreement have stalled, and days later, we have these two outbreaks of zoonotic viruses."
Neil Vora is the executive director of the Preventing Pandemics at the Source Coalition.
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Image Credit: Minks at a Swedish fur farm in 2009. Living in small cages very close to each other makes for easier transmission of pathogens. Image courtesy of Jo-Anne McArthur/Djurrattsalliansen/We Animals Media.
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Timecodes
(00:00) Two outbreaks
(07:55) Fur farms present a pandemic risk
(15:17) Banning fur farms in the EU
(23:10) 'We're hurting ourselves'
(29:29) Preventing Pandemics at the Source Coalition

"We are experiencing what some people call sort of a shutdown of the public square in the United States and around the world," says veteran environmental activist André Carothers. Along with the former executive director of Greenpeace US, Annie Leonard, the two have co-authored a new book about the history of protest, why it works, and why it's under attack.
Protest: Respect It. Defend It. Use It. was written to "remind readers about the role protests played in gaining a lot of the progress that we take for granted today," Leonard says.
Earth Day 1970 famously saw around 10% of the U.S. population actively participating in one of the largest demonstrations in the nation's history. This led to a number of landmark environmental laws that are arguably taken for granted today. Protest highlights how movements begin, and ultimately shape public discourse leading to these significant victories.
The authors also highlight how some in society often lionize protest movements of the past, while condemning ones of the present, forgetting that at their inception, protests and the movements they represent are often unpopular. Leonard and Carothers point to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose approval rating never went above 50% in all his years as a civil rights leader. His disapproval rating stood at 75% the year he was assassinated.
"There's something about the gymnastics of history that allows us to honor these people well after they're dead, but not when it's happening right in front of them," Carothers says.
You can find a copy of Protest: Respect It. Defend It. Use It. at theprotestbook.com.
Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast here.
Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Image Caption: Photographer Jonathan Bachman was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for capturing a photograph of Ieshia Evans being arrested in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It was Ieshia Evans first protest, and Bachman's first time covering one. The photo was included in The New York Times' "The Year in Pictures 2016," among other honors. jonathan bachman / reuters. Shepard Fairey—a prolific artist and activist who often addresses social and political issues in his work—was invited by the authors of 'Protest' to interpret Bachman's photograph for the book. Image credit to Shepard Fairey. Image Courtesy of Patagonia Books.
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Timecodes
(00:00) The attack on protesters
(10:32) Combatting vilification of protesters
(16:27) Amplifying messaging through art
(21:05) Why non-violence works
(32:04) A red line has been crossed
(36:56) How students are stopping a pipeline
(39:46) Earth Day 1970
(42:48) Protest is not enough

"That might be something that you see in a decade, not in two years of filming," Tara Stoinksi, CEO of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, tells me.
The behavior she's referring to occurs in mountain gorilla groups, such as a "dominance transfer," where a younger male silverback takes over leadership from an older male, and infanticide, where an outsider or ostracized gorilla kills the offspring of a new mother within the group. The former of these was captured on camera within days of filming for the new Netflix documentary A Gorilla Story: Told by David Attenborough.
Stoinski joins the Mongabay Newscast to discuss her role as a scientific adviser on the years-long project, the rarity of the behaviors captured on camera, and her thoughts on gorilla conservation in the Greater Virunga Landscape of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast here.
Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Image Credit: A male gorilla, Ubwuzu, as featured in the Netflix documentary. Image by Ben Cherry/Courtesy of Netflix/Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.
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Timestamps
(00:00) The story of 'Pablo's group'
(06:18) Unexpected behaviors
(19:42) Conservation challenges
(28:34) Regional conflict
(35:15) Final thoughts

Forester and scientist Suzanne Simard is well known for her landmark 1997 paper, which demonstrated that two distinct species of trees could share resources. At the time, it turned traditional Western forestry thinking on its head. Instead of the Darwinian view of trees as being in competition with each other, it introduced the idea that these trees may actually help each other, and that industrial logging practices may be missing the forest for the trees.
In recent years, Simard has been advocating for Indigenous knowledge as the only way to save the Earth and its forests. Environmental reporter Erica Gies spent some time in the field with Simard and her colleagues, looking into her latest project, The Mother Tree Project, which seeks to find the most sustainable form of forestry for both people and ecosystems.
Gies joins the Mongabay Newscast to explain what she learned from Simard and why she advocates Indigenous knowledge and systems, which are governed by rules of reciprocity. A shift in her thinking occurred when she read the dissertation of fisheries ecologist Teresa Sm'hayetsk Ryan, who now works with Simard.
"She realized that, you know, the people were also a very important part of the complex forest relationships," Gies says. "Which is much more of a reciprocity kind of mentality. If you take, you also give back. There is a responsibility to care for the system. Because if you don't, and if you overexploit it, it would be really easy to starve, right?"
Please take a minute to let us know what you think of our podcast, here.
Listen to our previous conversation with Erica Gies here.
Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Image Credit: Goose Island Archipelago is a cluster of tree-covered islands with wild, rocky beaches located off the central coast of British Columbia. Image courtesy of Alex Harris.
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Timecodes
(00:00) The 'wood-wide web'
(15:49) The Mother Tree Project
(19:33) Why reciprocity is needed
(30:27) Questions that remain