Australia’s wildfires ‘killed or displaced three billion animals’

Nearly three billion koalas, kangaroos and other native Australian animals were killed or displaced by wildfires in 2019 and 2020, according to the World Wide Fund For Nature.

The number is triple previous estimates and includes 143 million mammals, two billion reptiles and 180 million birds.

The country’s worst wildfires in decades destroyed millions of hectares of land.

Experts say koalas in eastern Australia will be extinct within 30 years if bushfires keep speeding up the decline in numbers.

“Without urgent government intervention, the koala will become extinct in New South Wales before 2050,” Cate Faehrmann from the NSW Parliamentary Inquiry Into Koala Populations, said. “This is extremely concerning, of course, to everybody who cares about koalas and indeed, from what we heard during the inquiry, of course, that’s pretty much everybody in New South Wales and across the world.”

Land clearing for farms, a prolonged drought, the lumber trade and other factors have also been a threat to the koalas’ habitat.

This video was produced and edited by Al Jazeera NewsFeed’s Hassan Ghani.