NSW is about to get a new Biodiversity Act that, if enacted, will replace a number of hard-won pieces of environmental law. Triage and reductionist science may play a role in the new Act. Such has been the rate of species extinction on Earth over recent years due to human impacts that a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, is proposed. The World Wildlife Fund estimates as many as 100 million species may exist on Earth. If one assumes the current extinction rate is at least 0.01 per cent, this amounts to 10,000 species lost each year: thousands of times above the natural background rate. In NSW, more than 1000 species of plants and animals and 100 ecological communities (habitats) are...
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