Numbat success story highlights Australia's battle against biodiversity collapse

In a landscape of mounting ecological despair, where Australia has become arguably the planet's extinction capital, losing roughly four species every decade, a small striped marsupial that resembles the love-child of a chipmunk and an anteater is offering a rare glimmer of hope, having been officially removed from the international endangered list after a decades-long battle to pull it back from the brink. The numbat, once populous across the southern half of the continent, now clings to existence in pockets of protected woodland such as Dryandra in the south-western corner of Western Australia, where a dedicated team of researchers and volunteers has managed to increase numbers ten-fold to an estimated 3,000 nationwide, a success that stands in stark contrast to the broader trajectory of biodiversity loss that has seen at least 100 plant and animal species vanish forever, with scientists confident the true figure is far higher. The annual spring survey, during which teams drive a daily circuit recording every numbat spotted, involves one person sitting in concentrated silence at each window and another perched in the back of a pick-up truck, ducking for branches, as they scan for a flash of stripes or a dart of movement, logging GPS coordinates, measuring distances, and using a complicated equation to estimate population health, a meticulous process that this year yielded one of the best counts yet, according to Dr Tony Friend, the godfather of conservation in the state.

The numbat's revival, however, belies the severity of the crisis unfolding across the nation, which Professor Euan Ritchie, a mammal ecologist, describes as a bloodbath unfolding before our very eyes, with the country leading the world in mammal extinctions and holding medals when it comes to the loss of other species classes, a record that he attributes to a combination of powerful threats including feral pests such as foxes and cats, which are sprayed with poison by detection machines placed along trails, invasive weeds like lantana, diseases such as chlamydia which has sent koalas to the edge of existence, and the skin-eating chytrid fungus that has caused seven frog extinctions and counting. The changing climate is creating unliveable conditions for some species, with native flying foxes dropping from trees in their thousands due to extreme temperatures, while natural disasters like the infamous Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20 killed an estimated three billion animals, and the successive years of record-breaking flooding that followed were so widespread that the impact on wildlife remains impossible to estimate, leaving many species that were once abundant across the continent isolated to increasingly small and disjointed patches, each impact compounding and leaving them more vulnerable to the next. Swathes of critical habitat are being cleared for development, farming, mining, and timber, a destruction that is not keeping pace with habitat protection and restoration projects, despite ramped-up efforts that have been funded by philanthropists and devoted volunteers, as government spending on nature protection sits at about A$700m, a fraction of the A$33bn conservationists say is needed, while more than A$26bn is still being spent on subsidies for industries like mining and intensive agriculture that cause harm to nature, creating a stark imbalance that Paul Elton, whose research the government disputes, describes as A$26 spent on harmful subsidies for every dollar spent on positive biodiversity action.

The federal government, which oversees matters of national importance, has sought to make nature protection a defining feature of its second term under Labor, with Environment Minister Murray Watt acknowledging that nature faces many challenges and that biodiversity is being lost at an alarming rate, while the party has increased emissions reduction efforts, boosted renewable energy projects, and passed revamped environment laws last year that were heralded as the most significant reform in a generation, though many in the sector argue that these laws are only the scaffolding of change, with the substance still being worked out in the form of National Environmental Standards and a federal watchdog to enforce them, and there is limited optimism that this will be a real turning point. Robert Hill, Australia's longest serving environment minister, who led the last major reforms in 1999 under John Howard's conservative coalition, concedes that successive governments have failed to adequately protect the environment over the past 30 years, including his own administration, and that the problem is not so much the regulatory tools available but rather the political will to use them, as the nation's wealth has largely been built off the back of its natural resources, often at the expense of the environment, and those riches still underpin the economy and help fund government spending on essentials like healthcare and housing. The battles between competing interests and states leave even the toughest environmental advocates within governments bruised, as illustrated by the Albanese government's decision last year to rush through laws protecting salmon farming in Tasmania, silencing opposition from within and ignoring its own department's advice on the impact of the A$1.4bn industry on the survival of the endangered Maugean Skate, a decision that Hill suggests reflects the political reality that the axe falls on environmental outcomes when there is an alternative economic one, and even if the government wants to act, it must have the political strength to turn its aspirations into reality.

Breeding programmes at institutions like Perth Zoo, where a young numbat scoffs custard with "termite sprinkles" before being released at Dryandra to boost genetic diversity, have made setting up additional populations of threatened species possible, but many cannot survive in the true wild due to the endless battle against predators, and are instead sent to fenced nature reserves that themselves face problems like in-breeding and overpopulation, while scientists also work to fight disease, a laborious endeavour that buys only a little more time for most species, and others are preserving genetic material in case resurrection from extinction becomes possible. The numbat's removal from the international endangered list, now classified as near-threatened, is a rare success that has kept conservationists fighting, but it is tempered by worry that this will make it harder to access funding and support needed to cement those gains, and Dr Friend cautions that the species is not out of the woods yet, pointing to the woylie, or brush-tailed bettong, which recovered slightly and was taken off the threatened list only to be added again a decade later in a worse state, serving as a cautionary tale that we cannot walk away and assume they are fine. For First Nations Australians, the decline of biodiversity also threatens their culture, with ecologist Jack Pascoe, a man from the Yuin Aboriginal nation, describing a personal and social feeling of loss that comes when these things are not doing well or are lost forever, and while public sentiment is shifting, there is scepticism that the government will prioritise the environment amid competing demands and compounding crises until voters force them to do so, as Ritchie puts it, knowing how to address the problems is like being a doctor seeing sick people who cannot be treated because no one will let you, a frustration that underscores the urgency of the crisis.