Australia has listed another 34 plants and animals as nationally threatened, pushing the total to 2,316 species and ecosystems — a number that cements this country's standing as one of the world's worst performers on biodiversity loss, and one that is still moving in the wrong direction.
The Australian Conservation Foundation, which reported the listing update, noted that the February 2026 round includes species that ought to concentrate minds in a way that dry statistics do not.
The Lemuroid Ringtail Possum of North Queensland's wet tropics is among the newly listed. It is a small, distinctive marsupial found in the cloud forests above Cairns — and it cannot survive extended exposure to temperatures above approximately 29 degrees Celsius. In a region where climate-driven temperature increases have already pushed against that threshold, the possum is not merely threatened by habitat loss. It is a direct indicator species for what happens to complex ecosystems when temperatures climb beyond what their inhabitants can tolerate.
Also newly listed: the Glossy Grass Skink from Tasmania's north-east, and the Mt Donna Buang Wingless Stonefly — found in a single square kilometre on Mt Donna Buang, east of Melbourne. The stonefly's entire known habitat is smaller than some Sydney council wards. Its margin for survival is almost literally zero.
Australia has the highest mammal extinction rate of any country on earth. That is not a historical fact about what once happened here. It is an ongoing measurement of what is happening now. The threatened species list is not a record of past losses — it is an early warning system for future ones, and the warning is getting louder.
Two related stories have emerged this week that illuminate the mechanism driving these numbers. Alcoa received regulatory approval to clear more jarrah forest in Western Australia — after being fined $55 million for illegally clearing the same forest type. Habitat destruction remains the primary driver of species loss in this country, and the regulatory framework designed to prevent it is visibly not working.
The federal government under Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has committed to nature-positive outcomes and a new Environmental Protection Agency. The 2,316 figure tells you where those commitments sit against the operational reality of environmental governance in a country that has been clearing and extracting since 1788.
Mate, there's a whole continent down here full of things that exist nowhere else on earth. We're losing them, and we're not treating it like the emergency it is.
