Kakadu, Wet Tropics one step away from ‘critical’

KAKADU National Park and the Wet Tropics of Queensland have been identified as being under major environmental threat.

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FOR the first time, Kakadu National Park and the Wet Tropics of Queensland have been identified alongside the Great Barrier Reef as under major environmental threat.

The first global assessment of the natural World Heritage sites, unveiled by the International Union for Conservation of Nature at World Parks Conference in Sydney, found all three iconic landscapes were a “significant concern” — one step away from “critical”.

The World Heritage Outlook 2014 report said the reef’s “fragile ... ecosystem and marine biodiversity are at risk”, but also found Kakadu and the Wet Tropics of Queensland were facing “massive challenges”.

The director of IUCN’s World Heritage program, Tim Badman, said the reef assessment was no surprise, but it was now clear Kakadu and the Wet Tropics also faced major challenges.

“The Great Barrier Reef could be recommended for the UNESCO “endangered” ranking next year. That’s what were trying to avoid,” he said.

“There’s really high-quality management going on, but in both the Wet Tropics and Kakadu there’s a clear pattern of threats which are combinations; in both cases the principal threat is related to invasive species and the predicted impacts of climate change. The assessment is that scale of threat is just out of reach of the current management interventions.”

The World Heritage Committee said it had already asked the federal government for a stronger response to the threats that the reef faced.

The report follows the government’s announcement that it would legislate to ban 100 per cent of sediment disposal in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and had committed a further $6 million to the six-nation Coral Triangle Initiative and $700,000 to help clean up marine debris in the reef and on its surrounding coastlines.