Transcription Audio

Hello and welcome. If you care about protecting Australian wildlife and landscapes, this episode is for you. I want to talk about why so many well-meaning conservation projects fail, not because people don’t care or don’t work hard, but because we keep missing the invisible trade-offs that never make it into the budget. Here’s the uncomfortable truth I’ve seen over twelve years working with NGOs, NRM bodies, and councils from the Kimberley to the Illawarra: we tend to measure success by what we can count and control—hectares fenced, seedlings planted, baits laid—while the actual drivers of biodiversity loss operate at scales and timeframes our projects rarely touch. That’s how you can plant thousands of trees and still watch local species decline. Layer on what’s changed. Australia has already warmed by around one point four seven degrees since 1910, and the 2019–20 Black Summer fires burned more than twenty-four million hectares and affected an estimated three billion animals. The templates we relied on a decade ago—the set-and-forget plans—are failing more often. The bar for evidence, risk management, and true co-governance is now much higher, because the stakes are. The best projects I’ve seen share one trait: they budget for complexity from day one. They invest not just in planting and fencing, but in understanding the downstream effects, the seasonal variability, and the cultural protocols that determine whether an intervention will survive beyond a grant cycle. In 2025, that’s not a nice-to-have; it’s essential. So let me reframe the real problem. Across hundreds of projects, I see the same pattern: we chase visible wins while the ecological function that sustains species remains unsettled. Good intentions underdeliver because three things are routinely ignored. First, multispecies dynamics. You control foxes and, surprisingly, cats can surge. You plant canopy trees and inadvertently squeeze out understory specialists. You restore one wetland and starve another downstream. Ecosystems are an interconnected web, and most project plans don’t account for those second and third dominoes. Second, climate risk isn’t baked into design. Provenances that worked in 1990 fail under 2030 conditions. Burns arrive earlier, flood pulses are wilder. Projects look perfect on paper and collapse in year three. That’s not bad luck; it’s a failure of foresight in a rapidly shifting landscape. Third, Indigenous knowledge shows up as an input, not as governance. Without shared authority and benefit, cultural burning and Country-informed priorities stay peripheral. That’s a missed opportunity, especially when Indigenous-managed lands consistently outperform conventional conservation areas on biodiversity metrics. If we’re serious about durable stewardship, we need to share the steering wheel, not just ask for directions. The result of ignoring those three? Money moves, metrics tick, but ecosystems don’t rebound. And everyone is left wondering why the outcomes lag the effort. The solutions exist, but they require honest conversations about power, time horizons, and what restoration truly costs. Let’s get practical and talk about two common mistakes I see all the time, and what to do instead. Mistake one: managing single threats in isolation. It’s intuitive to target one villain—say, foxes—and then celebrate the reduced fox numbers. But in many landscapes, suppressing one predator creates space for another. This is mesopredator release. Cats can expand and become even more efficient hunters of the small mammals and birds you’re trying to protect. I’ve seen community groups do everything right within their fox control project and still watch native species decline because cat pressure quietly surged in the background. The lesson here is simple to say and harder to do: ecosystems are complex. Don’t just remove a threat; plan for the cascade. Before you start a single-species control program, map the predator hierarchy in your area and ask, if we remove this pressure, which species or processes will expand to fill the gap—and what’s our counter move? Budget for integrated management from day one. That doesn’t mean doing everything everywhere; it means being explicit about the next domino and how you’ll meet it. Mistake two: planting trees that won’t thrive in future climates. It still feels right to source seed locally. It’s familiar, it’s tidy, and in a stable climate it made sense. But strictly local provenancing can lock in failure now. Climate-adjusted provenancing—sourcing seed from a blend of local and warmer or drier analogs—is increasingly best practice. Research from the Australian National University shows that using seed from regions projected to match future conditions can improve survival rates by up to twenty percent in tough environments. Yet many projects default to the climate of memory rather than the climate that’s arriving. I’ve watched entire revegetation programs look good in year one and then wither under heat stress and shifting rainfall. By year five, survival can drop below thirty percent, and what should be habitat becomes an expensive monument to denial. The fix is pragmatic. Local isn’t always best anymore. Future-proof your plantings. A simple hedging strategy might be sixty percent local seed, thirty percent from regions two to three hundred kilometers north or inland that mirror your projected future, and ten percent from even more challenging analogs as insurance. You’re building resilience, not gambling. And while we’re at it, let’s talk about hollows. Nest boxes can provide immediate relief, but natural hollows in many eucalypts take more than a century to form. Pair short-term measures like boxes with retention of existing hollow-bearing trees and techniques that accelerate hollow creation. Aim for long-term structural diversity, not just a fast canopy. Now, if we zoom back out, how do you “budget for complexity” in practice? Start by shifting what you measure. Inputs are easy to count; outcomes are what matter. Instead of hectares fenced, ask whether the target species is stabilizing or increasing. Instead of number of burns, ask whether the fire regime is moving toward the patchiness and timing that support your focal species. Build monitoring into your design so you can adjust early rather than publish a glossy report on a failed trajectory five years later. Bake climate risk into every critical decision. Use the best available regional projections to stress-test your plan. What happens under hotter, drier summers? Under more intense rainfall? Under smoke years or extended drought? Make your plant list, your burn windows, and your water management flexible enough to adapt. Set triggers and thresholds for change, and allocate resources to pivot, not just to start. And engage Traditional Owners as partners in governance, not consultants at the end. Co-design priorities on Country. Share authority over fire, access, and benefits. Align your timelines with community timelines. Projects that do this don’t just tick a box; they unlock practices and stewardship that endure beyond grants because they’re embedded in place and culture. If you’re in planning mode right now, here’s a simple mental checklist. One, what are the invisible trade-offs of this action, and have we budgeted to manage them? Two, how will this hold up under the climate we’re actually getting, not the one we remember? Three, who has lived knowledge of this place, and how are we sharing decision-making so that knowledge leads, not follows? Four, what outcome will prove this is working, and when will we change course if it isn’t? This approach might sound heavier upfront, but it saves time, money, and species down the line. It shifts you from chasing visible wins to engineering real outcomes. It replaces “set and forget” with “learn and adapt.” And it turns partnerships with Traditional Owners from ceremonial acknowledgments into shared stewardship that consistently delivers better biodiversity results. Let me leave you with this. The past few years have taught us that business as usual is not enough. Warming, fires, floods—these aren’t background noise; they’re the new operating system. The projects that thrive are designed for that reality. They accept that complexity isn’t an obstacle; it’s the terrain. They invest in understanding cascades, planning for climate, and sharing authority. And they measure success by whether wildlife and Country are actually recovering, not just whether the grant report looks neat. If you’re starting a program in 2025, resist the urge to reach for the familiar template. Run the thought experiments about predator cascades. Hedge your plantings for future climates. Build monitoring that can change your mind. Sit down early with Traditional Owners and design together. Budget for the invisible, because that’s where most of the work—and most of the payoff—actually lives. Thanks for spending this time with me. If this sparked ideas, bring it to your next team meeting and ask those four questions. That simple shift in conversation can change the trajectory of your project, and, more importantly, the trajectory of the species and places you care about.