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  Yahoo News 26 Sep 06
Conservation group warns koalas face extinction

SYDNEY (AFP) - Australia's cuddly national icon, the koala, faces extinction in parts of Australia within a decade as development destroys the marsupial's habitat, a conservation group warned.

Only around 100,000 koalas were left in the wild and numbers were declining rapidly, the Australian Koala Foundation (AKF) said ahead of a renewed push to protect the species on a national level.

The group plans to use Save the Koala Day this Friday to insist the government list the species as threatened.

"We want international pressure," AKF executive director Deborah Tabart said. "The koala is of national and global significance."

In 2004 the group sought to have the koala listed as threatened under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act -- the only law that protect species at a national level.

State governments were incapable of protecting the species, which was listed as vulnerable only in south-east Queensland state, Tabart said.

But Environment Minister Ian Campbell rejected the group's application in June this year after a scientific committee advised him koalas numbered in the hundreds of thousands and were not threatened on a national scale.

Tabart said she was outraged the government ignored her organisation's "compelling" evidence, which drew on scientific findings from 1,109 koala habitats. Tabart said the government's research was not as comprehensive as that of the AKF, which she estimated whose research cost 7 .5 million dollars (5.6 million dollars US) to conduct.

"We can scientifically prove that in northeastern New South Wales and southeastern Queensland the koala will be extinct within 10 to 15 years," she said.

The greatest threat to the koala, a species unique to Australia, was urbanization and a "scorched earth policy" among property developers, she said.

"The koala is like the canary in the cage," Tabart said. "I think you can confidently say there'll be no koalas in 10 years."
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