Almost 3 billion animals were killed or displaced by the disastrous bushfire season that blistered 10s of millions of acres across Australia in 2019 and 2020, according to experts who hope the research study will show the urgent requirement for action to prevent future disasters.
This finding, exposed Tuesday in an interim report commissioned by the World Wide Fund for Nature Australia, is almost three times greater than an estimate in January. It’s based upon a fire impact area of 28.3 million acres and is broken down into a shocking 143 million mammals, 2.46 billion reptiles, 180 million birds and 51 million frogs.
” It’s difficult to think about another event throughout the world in living memory that has actually killed or displaced that many animals,” stated WWF-Australia CEO Dermot O’Gorman in a media release. “This ranks as one of the worst wildlife disasters in contemporary history.”
Ten scientists from Australian universities and wildlife groups added to the bulk of the work. This consisted of Chris Dickman, an ecology professor at the University of Sydney, who, together with WWF-Australia in January, produced an early price quote of 1.25 b