Australia may need to consider selling off some of its National Parks if it is to be able to afford to conserve its most important landscapes and species for future generations, according to Professor Hugh Possingham, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions (CEED) at The University of Queensland.

“Basically, Australia is facing some very tough decisions," Professor Possingham said.

"For all our present nationwide investment in conservation, we are still losing both species and ecosystem integrity.

"We clearly need better ways to decide what we can afford to save, because the current system plainly isn't working as well as we'd hoped.

“The evidence indicates that Australian native species are still disappearing at a rate 100 to 1000 times faster than normal.

"Over the past 200 years, 22 mammal species have become extinct, over 100 are now on the threatened and endangered species list, and 6 more bird taxa were recently declared extinct.

"Fourteen species of frogs are on their last legs.”

With limited funds, both government and private, for conservation the nation may have to look at a new system for allocating those funds where both the need and the prospects of success are greatest, Professor Possingham said.

This implied that public funds may have to be withdrawn from some areas and reinvested in others.

“You could liken it to triage in a World War II military hospital: tough decisions may need to be taken about which patients have the best chance of survival and the resources allocated accordingly.

"Otherwise you spread your effort too thinly and achieve too little.

“This is not a popular point of view – but it is grounded in reality.

“While 12 per cent of the continent is enclosed in National Parks, few have sufficient resources to manage their biota intensively.

In the absence of major new sources of funds, we need to consider where the prospects of success are greatest and, indeed, what success in conservation actually consists of.”

In the past, Australian conservation tended to be driven by a wish to restore parts of the continent to a pre-European state – but this had proved impractical.

“It can't be done in a dynamic world, where human influences and changing climates are constantly altering the rules for survival,” Professor Possingham said.

Across the whole of Australia, current conservation investment was probably about a tenth of what would be needed to protect most species and ecosystems and reduce rates of extinction, he estimated.

“As funding at this level is unlikely to become available in the short run, we should look at putting resources into those National Parks and species where we have the best chance of achieving something - and that may mean selling off smaller parks that are not viable,” he said.

However, selling national parks need not mean their loss in a conservation sense – many well-off Australians now had a strong desire to look after native bushland and its species on a private basis, while many farmers were revegetating cleared land with native trees, leading to recovery in native species.

“Also there are enough covenants and restrictions in force now to ensure conservation of the landscape even when it is managed privately,” he said.

“If we have to refocus public investment on the National Parks where we can achieve the best conservation results, then maybe we should also find ways to encourage more Australians to take care of their own landscapes and endangered species privately.”

For effective decisions to be taken about which aspects of Australian biodiversity we can afford to manage well, there are two requirements, he said: better quantification of the actual costs of conservation – and better mathematical models for predicting the probable outcomes of various conservation actions.

Both were now becoming available.

“This thinking is exactly the way business operates – where can we invest to get the best return on our investment.

"The logic is equally compelling when applied to conservation.

“In short we have a basis for taking much better decisions about our environment which can ensure quintessential landscapes and key species are better protected.

"But those decisions will not happen without some losses and public controversy.

"It's a case of deciding which battles we can win with the resources available – and fighting those.”

CEED is an Australian Research Council funded Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions and is part of the Commonwealth's National Environmental Research Program (NERP). CEED's research tackles key gaps in environmental decision-making, monitoring and adaptive management.