Conservation Group Working To Save Australia's Wild Koalas

An Australian conservation group is trying to save the country's wild koalas, one tree at a time.

Transcript

00:00 Meet Lucy, a rehabilitated koala who spends her days munching on eucalyptus leaves in

00:05 eastern Australia.

00:06 Lucy is one of the lucky ones.

00:09 Here in the state of New South Wales, wild koala numbers have dropped more than 60% since

00:13 2001.

00:15 At that rate, they'd be extinct here by 2050.

00:18 And due to bushfires, logging and other factors, koalas in neighbouring states aren't faring

00:22 much better.

00:24 It's something that has conservationist Linda Sparrow deeply worried.

00:28 We adapt as climate change is changing the face of what we have to deal with here.

00:35 So it's not, you have to always be thinking what else can we do, how can we do it, how

00:40 can we make it better?

00:42 The answer is to plant trees.

00:44 Lots of them.

00:45 Since its founding in 2019, Sparrow's conservation group, Bangalow Koalas, has planted over 300,000.

00:52 These link up to create green corridors where koalas can thrive, even as their habitat disappears

00:58 elsewhere.

00:59 The network lets koalas that would otherwise be cut off from one another meet, encouraging

01:03 genetic diversity.

01:05 And the trees have the added benefit of sheltering many other threatened species.

01:10 The stress that they're under, car strikes, dog attacks, all that sort of stuff, there's

01:14 so much we need to help them with, keeping them off the road.

01:19 So our corridors are actually trying to get them away from humans, from cars, from dogs,

01:25 all that sort of stuff, so they can safely move across the landscape and not have to

01:30 put up with us humans.

01:33 The group plans to plant 500,000 trees by 2025.

01:37 It's a community effort, and one that tends to attract attention wherever the planting

01:41 takes place.

01:43 It's like a domino effect, where all these people, all over the northern rivers, want

01:48 to join our corridor.

01:49 So they contact us, we check and see if it fits, so is there koala habitat there or near

01:55 by, are there koalas nearby, and then we work on the priority, which is the most important

02:01 properties to do.

02:03 And so it keeps growing, as our trees do.

02:06 All this help can't come soon enough.

02:08 Last year an Australian government report found that the country has one of the fastest

02:12 rates of species decline among the world's wealthy countries.

02:16 The goal is to stop one of the most iconic Australian species from disappearing for good.

02:21 Eason Chan and John Ventriest for Taiwan Plus.

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