A combined Huon/Bruny Island environmental report card showed a disappointing drop from 6.5/10 to 3.2/10 in a single year, mainly due to the bushfires that ravaged southern Tasmania over the 2018 summer.
Sourced largely from automated analysis of satellite imagery, the report collated by the Centre for Water and Landscape Dynamics at the Australian National University draws together ground- and satellite data with environmental prediction models.
Using statistical areas (from the ABS) as the reporting region, this approach compares remote data with the averages since the turn of the century (2000).
Maybe surprisingly, the region, despite this precipitous drop, compares well with the nation’s average score of 0.8/10 – and this is prior to the calamities experienced by across the eastern seaboard on the 2019 bushfires, floods and droughts.
This should be a wake-up call for policy-makers, that our cherished environment is doing so badly.
Yet whilst world-wide emergency actions are precipitated by threats to human health of the Covid 19 pandemic, only persisently luke-warm responses are experienced to the much slower, but potentially more widespread lethality of global climate change, extinction and habitat loss.
