Threatened Species Summit
Chair’s summary
Today, at Australia’s first Threatened Species Summit, two hundred and fifty influential delegates came to Melbourne Zoo to raise the profile of threatened species and secure more action to save them. The Australian Government has released the first Threatened Species Strategy, and has committed $6.6 million of funding as a down payment ondelivery.
State and territory ministers, international guests, chairs of natural resource management boards, leaders of community groups, non-government organisations, businesses, wildlife experts, and eminent scientists are building momentum for increased and improved effort in threatened species recovery.
The scene was set with a powerful video message from Jane Goodall, and profound insights from New Zealand’sMinister for Conservation, the Hon Maggie Barry ONZM, and United States AmbassadorJohn Berry.
With the launch of the Threatened Species Strategy comesa commitment by the Australian Government to act on the principles of science, action and partnership. The Threatened Species Strategy also established an action plan focused on tackling feral cats, creating safe havens, protecting and recovering habitat, and emergency intervention to avoid extinctions. Importantly, it has hard and measurable targets for reducing the threat of feral cats, recovering mammals and birds, protecting plants and improving recovery practices.
Given that feral cats are putting 124 Australian animals at risk of extinction, the summit had an appropriately strong focus on tackling this threat – we know that feral cats are the number one threat to our small mammals and we need to act. I announced an ambitious set of feral cat targets — an Australia-wide goal of culling 2 million feral cats by 2020, five new cat free islands, 10mainland cat free enclosures, 10 million hectares of feral cat management across the country and an additional 2 million hectares on Commonwealth land — and I backed these targets by announcing over $4 million in feral cat specific funding.
As part of an important partnership with the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, the Australian Government is backing AWC’s leadership in developing a national network of feral free areas - areas where threatened species will be able to thrive and multiply without the threat of feral predators. Along with our commitments to support Mulligan’s Flat Wildlife Sanctuary in the ACT and Mt Rothwellin Victoria, feral free areas will be a powerful tool in the fight against extinctions.
Environment Ministers at the summit were unanimous about the need to tackle the harm caused by feral cats and agreed to get the policy settings right; supporting the Australian Government’s new threat abatement plan for predation by feral cats and committing to take steps to treat feral cats as invasive pests. Tohelp meet the feral cat targets, I launched a new FeralCatScan app that will help local communities in the fight against the harm caused by feral cats. Freely downloadable for Iphone and Android devices, the app will grow citizen science and community participation to support feral cat eradication. Together, these changes will make it easier for everyone, including farmers, community groups and scientists, to join in the fight against feral cats and reach our ambitious feral cat eradication targets.
The $6.6 million of new initiatives announced at the summit came from partnerships across state and territory borders and important commitments from individual organisations.
The next 12 months will be important in continuing the momentum for threatened species protection, consolidating partnerships and delivering the first set of targets in the Strategy. Initiatives announced here at the summit will kick start implementation of Australia’s Threatened Species Strategy and begin the journey towards ambitious targets.
Reflecting on the value of coming together today, I look forward to future threatened species summits to reflect on our progress, share our lessons learnt, and celebrate our successes.
For more information, including transcripts of the day, you can visit:
The Hon. Greg Hunt MP
Minister for the Environment
16 July 2015