Nearly 3 billion animals killed or displaced by Australia fires
According to WWF Australia, the new figures are three times the earlier estimate of 1.2 billion released in January.
Nearly 3 billion animals were killed or displaced by Australia’s devastating bushfire season of 2019 and 2020, according to scientists who have revealed for the first time the scale of the impact on the country’s native wildlife.
This finding, revealed Tuesday in an interim report commissioned by the World Wide Fund for Nature Australia, is nearly three times higher than an estimate in January. It’s based on a fire impact area of 28.3 million acres and is broken down into a staggering 143 million mammals, 2.46 billion reptiles, 180 million birds, and 51 million frogs.
Ten scientists from the University of Sydney, the University of New South Wales, the University of Newcastle, Charles Sturt University, and BirdLife Australia contributed to the majority of the work.
The project is led by the University of Sydney researchers Lily Van Eeden and Chris Dickman. While results are still being finalised, the latest figure of nearly three billion animals impacted is not likely to change, WWF Australia said in a statement.
Lead researcher Lily van Eeden, of the University of Sydney, said the study was the first to attempt a continent-wide assessment of the impact of bushfires on animals. The analysis is based on a burned zone of 11.46m hectares (28.31m acres), an area nearly the size of England. It includes about 8.5m hectares of forest, mostly in the southeast and southwest but including 120,000 hectares of northern rainforest.
Key Facts
- The total number of creatures affected includes 143 million mammals, nearly 2.5 billion reptiles, 180 birds, and 51 million frogs that were impacted by the fires that burned 46 million acres of Australia.
- “This ranks as one of the worst wildlife disasters in modern history,” said WWF-Australia CEO Dermot O’Gorman in the Tuesday report.
- Though the animal death count is unverified, Dr. Chris Dickman, who co-led the research, said the chances animals evaded the flames are “not great” due to lack of food and shelter.
- He also blamed the calamity on a lack of climate-sensitive policies: “How quickly can we decarbonize? How quickly can we stop our manic land clearing?” he said.
- In January WWF reported nearly 1.3 billion animals died in the 2019-20 brushfires, so this reflects a near 300% increase.
- The report was compiled by ten scientists from the University of Sydney, University of New South Wales, University of Newcastle, Charles Sturt University, and BirdLife Australia—and the full report will likely be released in August.
The plight of Australia’s popular koalas garnered international media attention during the fires, with thousands of the tree-dwelling marsupials believed to have perished.
But a government report early this year cited 100 other threatened native plant and animal species that had lost more than half their habitat to the blazes, raising the prospect of far greater losses.
Scientists say global warming is lengthening Australia’s summers and making them increasingly dangerous, with shorter winters making it more difficult to carry out bushfire prevention work.
