Why save the orange-bellied parrot?

The endangered orange-bellied parrot is worth fighting for. If we don't put in resources to save the orange-bellied parrot as a rich comfortable country, what's our excuse?

FOR MORE THAN 30 years Australian taxpayer funds have been spent trying to prevent the extinction of a small green parrot with orange on its belly that nests only in remote south-west Tasmania. Fewer than 50 now remain. So dire was their situation that most offspring bred in 2011 were deliberately taken into captivity as insurance against complete loss of the wild population.

Such conservation is expensive, especially when it involves captive populations. Over the years millions of dollars have been spent on the orange-bellied parrot. Not only that, but fears for the parrot's welfare have delayed or prevented development worth tens of millions of dollars.

Can such expense be justified? Some people have suggested that we should give up on the parrot and spend the money on less expensive species with a better chance of long term success?

They are two quite separate questions. The first concerns whether we should conserve species at all, and is essentially political. Through the Earth's history many species have become extinct just as others have evolved. Thus species have no intrinsic value — their value has been created by humans — so biodiversity conservation is as much subject to democratic processes as conservation of, say, great art.

While one can mount utilitarian arguments for keeping species — biodiverse landscapes do provide more services than depleted ones — I believe most people don't want species extinction because of an emotional response to losing something irreplaceable.

Personally I think the extent to which we conserve species says a great deal about who we are as a civilised society.

Many societies over the millennia have, usually without knowing it, caused extinction. Also many people around the world today are too impoverished to think beyond their personal needs, though the depth of commitment to retaining special species shown by some of the poorest people is astonishing.

Here in Australia we have stable government, well-enforced laws and the highest median income in the world. The only reason that we cannot hand over the extraordinary array of life we have inherited to future generations is a lack of commitment.

Thus the first question should be turned on its head. Instead of asking whether the expense can be justified, we should be asking whether extinction can be contemplated at all. So much of what we create in our society is ephemeral. Through the amazing process of reproduction, which we tend to take for granted, species have the potential to be with us indefinitely. If we allow them.

The second question about spending limited funds elsewhere is far harder. There can be no argument that we should try to spend conservation money as efficiently as possible. And this can best be achieved through systematic conservation planning rather than the ad hoc system we have adopted traditionally, and which has meant much money has been spent on species that are not really threatened at all.

At its simplest, systematic conservation planning involves estimating the cost of retaining each threatened species and spreading the available money across as many species as possible. At the end of the list will be species that are too expensive to retain.

However society does not value all species equally. To allow for this, priorities can be weighted to give preference to species that are more distinctive, more threatened, more readily conserved or more charismatic. In addition species to which society has shown a sustained commitment over many years can be insulated from the prioritisation process and funded from a separate allocation.

Of course adopting such a system has many uncertainties. If you take funds from existing programs, there is no guarantee they will be spent on other threatened species — look how readily the biodiversity fund was cut last year.

Also it assumes that only government will pay. Many threatened species programs around the world are funded by private organisations. There is great potential for public-private partnerships in threatened species management that could extend the public allocation.
Volunteers also play a major role — certainly the many thousands of hours volunteers have spent surveying orange-bellied parrots over the years in wintery saltmarsh is testament to the value some people place on the bird.

And it is this level of commitment that I think help justify the orange-bellied parrot as a special case. Some think a failure to increase the population over 30 years as a failure. I think retaining the species at all is a major achievement. And it is a species that retains the potential to increase if only we can identify and alleviate the greatest constraints — with the adverse effects of fire and food availability during the breeding season now seen as having far more significance than previously realised.

If we consciously decide to abandon this most critically endangered of Australian parrots, we are deliberately deciding to pass on a diminished world to our children.

Professor Stephen Garnett is a conservation biologist at Charles Darwin University.