Conservation organisation takes legal action against federal environment ministers
The Wilderness Society (TWS) and Environmental Justice Australia (EJA) have taken legal action in early March alleging that successive federal environment ministers have failed to meet their obligation to create recovery plans for native species threatened with extinction. Members of the TWS legal team allege that ministers have failed to provide and enact recovery plans for at least 11 endangered species including the greater glider, the ghost bat and the Baudin’s cockatoo.
Under Australia’s federal nature law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act), the environment minister is required by law to make Recovery Plans for certain threatened species and keep them in force. Yet for many of Australia’s threatened species – like black cockatoos, potoroos, lungfish and Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagles – these Recovery Plans are missing. Some have never had a plan. Others have been left to expire.
An Auditor General report in 2022 found that since 2013, only 2% per cent of Recovery Plans were completed within the statutory time frame.
A recovery plan is a detailed roadmap designed to help a species avoid extinction. It lays out the specific steps needed to stop a species’ decline, and help it thrive in the wild again. It should identify critical habitat, outline key threats, and guide government decisions — including project approvals. The goal is to stop further decline and, ideally, take that species off the threatened list altogether.
It’s a bit like a doctor’s treatment plan for a patient — only in this case, the “patient” is an entire species that needs urgent care to survive.
“Politicians need to be held accountable, so they do their job and take action on Australia’s extinction crisis,” said Sam Szoke-Burke, Biodiversity Policy & Campaign Manager at TWS. “Not only is it the job of the environment minister to protect threatened animals and plants by making a recovery plan, but it’s their legal duty. And we aim to prove it, in court.”
The TWS and EJA teams hope that, following this case, Australia’s Environment Ministers will be compelled to make the recovery plans for threatened species that will bring them back from the brink of extinction.
Read more on this case at The Wilderness Society website, and a story published in The Guardian.
