Why are Australia’s native animals going extinct?

Australia is home to some of the world's most distinctive wildlife — nearly 90% of its mammals exist nowhere else on Earth. But Australia is also where a mammal extinction is happening at an alarming pace.

Species are disappearing at a rate of roughly four every decade, driven by feral predators, habitat destruction, and a changing climate. Feral cats alone kill an estimated three billion native animals and insects every year.

But it’s not all bleak. In Western Australia, conservationists have spent decades bringing the numbat, a small, striped marsupial found only in Australia, back from the brink, and it's just been reclassified as no longer endangered.

The bigger question is whether that success story can be repeated elsewhere, especially when government spending on conservation lags far behind what experts say is needed.

On this episode of Asia Specific, host Mariko Oi discusses the extinction crisis with BBC Senior Journalist Tiffanie Turnbull and Professor Euan Ritchie, Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation at Deakin University.

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