CANBERRA:
More than 40 per cent of Australia, an area the size of India, remains untouched
by humans, making the country as critical to the world's environment as the
Amazon rainforests, a study said on Wednesday.
Australia has some of the last
great wilderness, with three million square kilometres (1.1 million square
miles) largely unchanged by industrial civilisation, a report for international
conservation watchdogs the Pew Environment Group and Nature Conservancy
said.
"It's rare on earth in
this century," Australian wildlife ecologist and report author Barry Traill told
local radio. "We need to hold onto this country. It's just so precious," he
said.
Australia was one of
five great remaining wilderness zones, along with Antarctica, the Amazon, the
Sahara Desert and Canada's northern Boreal, the report said.
Most of the untouched areas
were in the country's vast interior and northern savanna, including largely
Aboriginal Arnhem Land, northern Cape York Peninsula, the vast southwest
Nullarbor plain and the central Gibson desert. Pristine areas faced their
biggest threat from introduced feral animal and plant species including pigs,
rabbits, foxes, buffaloes and noxious weeds, the report said.
"Around that core of wild
lands, hundreds of millions more acres are healthy enough that they can still
support the maintenance of resilient ecosystems," Pew said on its website.
In addition to its wilderness
treasures, Australia had some of the world's most protected marine areas, with
the Great Barrier Reef the largest living organism, it said.
Australia, the world's oldest
continent, ranked first globally for the total number of unique native mammal
and reptile species, and among the top five countries in total numbers of
endemic plants, birds and amphibians.
Traill said Australia's
government should be recruiting up to 5,000 extra Aboriginal rangers to act as
guardians of untouched areas, with only 10 percent of the country currently
protected as parklands and reserve. "If you drive through and see these vast
areas of bushland, it looks in pretty good shape, but there are subtle changes
happening, and we need to get people back out there managing it," he
said.