There is also a belief that greater regulation alone will achieve little.<\/p>\n
Too much conservation work currently relies on philanthropists’ cash and devoted volunteers, those in the sector say, and much more languishes on the to-do list due to a lack of money.<\/p>\n
The federal government directly spends about A$700m on nature protection, a fraction of the A$33bn \u2013 or 1% of GDP \u2013 conservationists say it should be. That is an eyebrow-raising figure, people like Paul Elton concede, but one they argue is reasonable.<\/p>\n
According to his research \u2013 which the government disputes \u2013 more than A$26bn is still being spent on subsidies for things like mining, intensive agriculture or fuel despite Australia signing global pledges to wind them back.<\/p>\n
“For every dollar the government is spending on positive biodiversity conservation action, there’s A$26 being spent on subsidies that are causing harm to nature,” he tells the BBC.<\/p>\n
“That’s a pretty stark imbalance.”<\/p>\n
Minister Watt didn’t directly respond to questions about conservationists’ demands, but said: “We remain committed to long-term environmental recovery, in partnership with state and local governments, community and environmental groups.”<\/p>\n
Though public sentiment is shifting, there’s scepticism the government will prioritise the environment amid competing demands and compounding crises until voters force them to do so.<\/p>\n
“The community will say to you, we should spend a lot of money on the environment. And then if you say, ‘Well, what are you prepared to sacrifice to ensure that funding base?’, then they’re no longer interested,” Hill says.<\/p>\n
In the face of so many challenges and what they see as little progress, advocates admit it’s hard to hang on to hope.<\/p>\n
“We know what the problems are. We know how to address them. We know when we spend money on the environment, it pays back many times over,” Ritchie, a mammal ecologist, says.<\/p>\n
“It’s like being a doctor and seeing all these sick people in the community and you know how to fix them, but no one will let you do that.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is also a belief that greater regulation alone will achieve little. Too much conservation work currently relies…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":731896,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":["post-731895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/731896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}