DAY 19 – MARCH FOCUS ON NORFOLK ISLAND’S REEF

Vulnerable, threatened, endangered?

In today’s March focus on Norfolk Island’s reef, I look at how we protect these kinds of habitats and the species living there. Read on to discover some major flaws in Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (the EPBC Act) and just a hint at some of the complex governance issues that work agains Norfolk Island’s reef. I also discuss the anomalies between the different lists produced by different organisations for which species are deemed to be vulnerable, threatened and endangered.

Two questions that have been bothering me and exercising my mind quite a bit are:

• How do you know if something is endangered, threatened or vulnerable if you don’t know what it is?

• And if you don’t know what it is, or even if it exists, how can it be classed and protections afforded to it?

Such is the conundrum for some of our species here on Norfolk Island.

We have a ‘Norfolk Island Region Threatened Species Recovery Plan’ into which much time and effort is poured. This recovery plan relies heavily on, and is informed by, the EPBC Act’s listings of endangered species. Our last iteration of this report was 2010 and as I type the finishing touches are being completed on the new one before it goes out to public consultation.

I have included the 2010 report at the bottom of this blog post in the Further reading section. In the introduction, it says this:

The plan covers all of the threatened species in the Norfolk Island Group that are listed under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) comprising 46 plant species, five species of land snails, five bird species and two reptile species.

Except where they are also listed as threatened, recovery plans are not required for species listed as migratory or marine under the EPBC Act.

I have been told that the updated version of the Recovery Plan has a similar lack of marine species. And the reason for this is a lack of baseline data to inform a vulnerability assessment.

Followers of this blog and social media page will know I am a keen advocate of iNaturalist, especially for somewhere like Norfolk Island, which is a biodiversity hotspot. It isn’t perfect, but it is pretty good for what it does. You can find all my observations here. When a contributor (you or me) enters the details of an observation, if it is deemed to be threatened or vulnerable then where you saw that observation (for example, in Emily Bay, Kingston, Norfolk Island) is automatically obscured from the view of the general public.

This is the explanation given by iNaturalist for obscuring the coordinates of such an observation:

… taxon geoprivacy is a process through which the iNaturalist platform automatically restricts geographic information associated with observations of taxa threatened by location disclosure …

iNaturalist uses a whole range of information to arrive at this classification, including among other things the IUCN Red List. Although, for some reason these lists don’t always match the list of threatened species contained in Australia’s  EPBC Act, for example.

Anyway, for the purposes of this post, below is a list of marine species found here and for which there are iNaturalist records that are classed as threatened.

Black rockcod

Blotched Fantail Ray

Chevron butterflyfish

Doubleheader

Harlequin filefish

Norfolk Island blenny

Dusky whaler

Galapagos shark

Sandbar shark

Black-mouthed tun snail

Ram’s Horn squid

Green sea turtle

Acropora solitaryensis

Hammer coral

Lord coral

Turbinaria heronensis

iNaturalist’s list is far from exhaustive, mainly because it relies on the observations of citizen scientists: some species may simply not have been recorded by anyone for this geographical location yet; some species have not been assessed for vulnerability yet; and there will be some species that we aren’t even aware of their existence yet, such is our limited knowledge about Norfolk Island’s marine habitat.

Here is an example of a case in point: Professor Andrew Baird, chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies has told me that that up to 30 per cent (a conservative estimate) of the coral species documented on Norfolk Island are as yet undescribed. In other words, a third of our corals could be unique. And the way we are going we could lose them before we even understand what we have. We have no idea if they are new species or not, let alone if they are threatened, vulnerable or endangered.

As I have said before on these pages, if around 30 per cent of our corals are as yet undescribed, then not moving heaven and earth to save them is tantamount to burning the library before you know what is on the shelves, isn’t it?

Which in a rather irritatingly circular way brings me back to the questions I began with:

• How do you know if something is endangered, threatened or vulnerable if you don’t know what it is?

• And if you don’t know what it is, or even if it exists, how can it be classed and protections afforded to it?

But the EPBC Act doesn’t just protect individual species, fortunately for us it protects places, too. Or does it?

Protected places

For those who may not be across these things, the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water’s website describes the EPBC Act as ‘the Australian Government’s central piece of environmental legislation’. It came into force in 1999.

One of the ‘protected matters’ that is covered under the Act is Commonwealth marine areas.

Because of a quirk in our governance, Norfolk Island has no State-level government, with all the attendant responsibilities that a State undertakes on behalf of its citizens. Which is significant. Because where there is a State government, the stretch of water that is under that State’s jurisdiction is defined as being three nautical miles seaward of the territorial baseline (most often the low-tide mark). States are responsible for protecting their own significant species and places that are within their jurisdiction. Therefore, without any State-level governance, here on Norfolk Island we step directly off the beach into a Commonwealth marine area, ergo an area that comes under the EPBC Act.

Which begs the question: why has the Commonwealth, with its ‘central piece of environmental legislation’ allowed the water quality in our bays get to the stage where we have signs up warning us about swimming in there, and to the stage where it is having a detrimental effect on our wildlife – and that includes all the small things, not just the larger charismatic fauna and flora that are favoured under the EPBC Act?

Government silos don’t work on a small island

The water that comes into the lagoons (an Australian Marine Park, under the auspices of the Department of the Environment) traverses a World Heritage Area (Commonwealth of Australia land administered by the Department of Infrastructure), which is also a place that is also covered by the EPBC Act.

On a still day, if you stand quietly by the bridge near Chimney Hill in Kingston – before the water flows through Major Anderson’s Penal Settlement grotto and out into the bay – and take a deep breath, you’ll be unpleasantly surprised, greeted by what can only be described as a distinct pong. Cattle wandering through the wetlands freely urinate and defaecate into the swamp water, which eventually flows into the bays.

For the record, each cow can produce on average about 29.5 kg of faeces a day and about 30 litres of urine.

The Commonwealth are upgrading the sewer system in Kingston, aren’t they? And indeed they are. Kudos for that, but it won’t stop the cows. Nor does problem just start and end from within the Kingston area. Like water, the problems flow downhill from elsewhere – such as residential and business premises’ septic systems, from our grey water overflows, and from what we, as residents, put onto our gardens in terms of fertilisers and pesticides, among many other things.

So, like the ‘problems’, we too must move up the hill into the next government silo, the one looked after by our Norfolk Island Regional Council. There we encounter yet more issues around governance, such as being legally able to gain access to private property to ensure septic systems comply and are maintained properly.

And so the issues go on and compound.

I won’t bore you any further. I am sure you have already developed a feel for the problems around saving one small reef.

How long is long enough?

The Commonwealth took over the governance of Norfolk Island nearly eight years ago. However, even though Norfolk was self-governing from 1979 to 2015, it doesn’t mean the Australian government didn’t have responsibilities here. We have reports voicing concerns around water quality going back to the 1960s. One has to ask why the advice contained in these has been ignored.

When the EPBC Act came into force in 1999, you’d have thought then there would have been some action. But sadly no. Why has nothing been done before now?

I’m not a policy wonk, nor am I a legal expert. And I appreciate things aren’t always easy to achieve. But surely it is high time these legacy issues – which include failing and inadequate infrastructure, deficient laws and unsatisfactory protections – were fixed once and for all.

Further reading

• Threatened species under the EPBC Act

• Norfolk Island Region, Threatened Species Recovery Plan