Already Australia's rarest mammal, scientists don't
know what effect climate change will have on
Gilbert's potoroo

At a forum organised by Conservation Council WA earlier this month, researchers heard that of the nearly 29,000 published studies on rising temperatures collected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, just six are from Australia.

Not a single study was from WA, despite the state being home to one of the world’s richest biodiversity hotspots, the South-West.

“We have the wooden spoon award for climate change research,” says Dr Nic Dunlop, CCWA’s biodiversity conservation officer.

“We are one of the areas in the world that shows the most rapid changes in climate and the greatest decline in rainfall – greater than anywhere else on the planet – and we know nothing about what it’s actually doing to our natural systems.”

He says scientists have been forced to rely on incidental information, collected for other studies, and the observations of amateurs or “citizen scientists”.

“At the moment we are just scrambling around, looking for serendipitous blips.”

Meanwhile, scientists are reporting the rapid decline and death of the South-West’s tuart, tingle and wandoo forests, as well as threats to kelp beds – an important marine ecosystem – and fauna.

Although it retains only 10 per cent of its original vegetation, the area is habitat for about 8,000 plant species – three-quarters of which are found nowhere else – and nearly 500 vertebrate species.

Australia's most endangered reptile, the western swamp tortoise, and the country’s rarest mammal, Gilbert’s potoroo, are both found only in the South-West.

Dr Lynda Chambers, of the Bureau of Meteorology’s Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research, told the forum that the amount of historical information collected on the potential impact of climate change on Australia’s biota is “largely unknown and most datasets have not yet been analysed for climate change signals”.

“Compounding this is a lack of a national co-ordinated approach to the analysis and cataloguing of climate change effects in the (South-West) region, which reduces our ability to detect and attribute climate change signals,” she said.

Dr Dunlop believes local climate change research has suffered from a policy focus on end-gain science.

“We are a frontier economy and our research policies are all about making money. If you can’t show you’ll make money from your research, you’ll miss out on funding. Climate research is about painstaking, consistent, large-scale monitoring of changes; it’s not about making money.”

Grant Wardell-Johnson, Associate Professor of Biodiversity and Climate Change at Curtin University of Technology’s Muresk Institute, has been studying the flora and fauna of the South-West since the early 1980s.

His focus has been on the white-bellied and orange-bellied frog species and the native forests.

“One of the issues is that, unlike North America and South Africa, the South-West has no high latitude areas for species to migrate to as the climate heats up,” he says.

“Flora doesn’t move well to survive climate change, but fauna doesn’t move that well either. Some species might move no more than a few metres in a lifetime.”

He says the South-West’s unique, ancient weathered landscape had a “whole set of biogeographical borders” that had resulted in fascinating genetic variations, even within the same species.

“We don’t just need to think about protecting a population here or there – we need to conserve many populations of the same species.”

Already battling the effects of altered fire regimes, feral predators, land clearing and crops that soaked up vital groundwater, the South-West’s biota now face a rapidly changing climate.

“There is a big ramping up of the problems these species face,” Professor Wardell-Johnson says. “We have had dry times in the past but these have previously been associated with coldness. Now it is becoming hotter and drier and this is unprecedented in historical times, perhaps even ancient times.”

Scientists at the CCWA forum believe that crucial climate change data could be collected by galvanising volunteers and increasing collaboration between universities.

Professor Wardell-Johnson says: “I know there are plenty of people who say it’s too later, we are going to lose a lot of species. There are going to be impacts from climate change, there is no avoiding it. But if we start now, with the data we have, and really work together with universities, volunteers and government, then we have a better chance of managing the problems.