No Koalas in NSW by 2050?

A NSW Parliamentary Committee has forecast that, without urgent government action, by 2050 there will be no koalas in NSW [LINK HERE].

In 2016 the NSW Government adopted a State-wide estimate of 36,000 koalas for the purposes of designing and administering the measures to protect them and their habitat. The NSW Chief Scientist proposed this number [LINK HERE], which was taken from the published results of a survey of the views of 16 scientists working in the field [LINK HERE].

Concerns about the future of the koala in NSW, led the Planning and Environment Portfolio Committee of the NSW Legislative Council to review of the situation and outlook for local populations and their habitats.

The Committee received different views on how many koalas lived in NSW and what was the best way to survey their numbers. Some were from environmental scientists, many from environmental activists, and not a few from people who are both of those things.

The differences were profound and, in part, reflect the practical difficulties involved. In the wild, the number of koalas per hectare is generally very low, individuals are difficult to identify, and there is much we do not know about the koala and how it behaves. In his oral evidence to the Committee, Professor Matthew Crowther, an ecologist with the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Sydney [LINK HERE], summarised the difficulties this way:

“I would not want to give [an estimate for NSW] because we do not know. Many populations are very low density and very hard to estimate. Many of the methods rely on having so many koalas to count for some accuracy of the estimation.”

Professor Crowther added that the difficulty of predicting how a given habitat will change over time meant that scientists could not forecast the size of its koala population at any time in the future.

The Committee could have made a useful contribution to resolving some of this uncertainty, at least from a public policy perspective. For example, it could have actively facilitated a structured and open debate among the relevant scientists to see what might emerge from it in terms of a more nuanced understanding of the disputed science. In parallel it could have widened the debate to include scientists from our disciplines, such as statisticians and complex systems specialists.

Instead the Committee decided to ignore Professor Crowther’s advice completely. It concluded that the current offical estimate was outdated and unreliable; and therefore the NSW Koala Strategy was a failure.