The tiger quoll lost 82 per cent of its total referred habitat to projects considered unlikely to have a significant impact. Photo Credit: JJ Harrison / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported |
Federal environmental laws are failing to mitigate against Australia’s extinction crisis, according to University of Queensland research.
UQ PhD candidate Natalya Maitz led a collaborative project which analyzed potential habitat loss in Queensland and New South Wales and found the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation 1999 (EPBC) Act is not protecting threatened species.
“The system designed to classify development projects according to their environmental impact is more or less worthless,” Ms. Maitz said.
“There’s no statistically significant difference between the amount of threatened habitat destroyed under projects deemed ‘significant’ or ‘not significant’ by the national biodiversity regulator.”
Under the EPBC Act, individuals or organizations looking to commence projects with a potentially ‘significant impact’ on protected species must seek further federal review and approval.