Kwongan region." width="1000" height="600" class="gu-image" /> The Western Australian opposition has thrown its support behind a bid to get a large swathe of West Australian Kwongan region on the Unesco world heritage list.
A group of WA scientists is campaigning to have a stretch of land from Shark Bay, 1,000km north of Perth, to Esperance, 700km south-east, considered for nomination on the basis of both its environmental and cultural values.
The region is about the same size as England, but University of Western Australia professor Hans Lambers told Guardian Australia on Tuesday the nomination would only include existing national parks and reserves, which make up about 10% of the area.
WA Labor’s environment spokesman, Chris Tallentire, said both government and the public should support the idea, at least in the early stages of exploring and cataloguing the heritage value of the area. “It’s something that’s really worth a strong public discussion,” he said.
Tallentire said Unesco world heritage status was an internationally recognised tourism asset and would provide an economic boost as well as protecting an important ecosystem.
Lambers, University of WA emeritus Prof Don Bradshaw, and Prof Steve Hopper are members of the Kwongan Foundation that is pushing for a world heritage bid.
Bradshaw, a zoologist, said the area was home to a number of unique animals as well as a diverse plant life.
The most notable species is the honey possum, a tiny 10-gram marsupial. Bradshaw said the species was about 60m years old and dated back to when Australia was part of Gondwanaland, but was now only found in a few patches in regional WA.
It’s Australia’s sole honey- and pollen-eating mammal and gets by with hardly any teeth, just a long tongue to feed on the flowers of plants that only grow in the Kwongan.
“They weigh about 10 grams and they take in their own body weight in honey or pollen every day,” Bradshaw said.
Honey possums are among 14 marsupial species endemic to the Kwongan, quokkas, western ring-tailed possums and Gilbert’s potteroo, which was rediscovered by two science students who were trying to trap quokkas on a beach in 1994. Numbats and woylies are now also only found in the Kwongan.
There are also 145 reptile species in the area, 31 of which are endemic, and 30 frog species, 28 of which are endemic.
Bradshaw said most of those species were under threat from habitat loss. “The wheatbelt [where some of the Kwongan is located] is this area where all this ecology is, which has just been destroyed by clearing for wheat,” he said.
Hopper said the area was rich in Noongar cultural history (Kwongan is a Bibbulmun Noongar name for the region) as well as being a global biodiversity hotspot.
“It clearly meets the criteria for the world heritage listing, for both natural and cultural heritage,” he said.
There are 19 existing Unesco world heritage sites in Australia qualified on both natural and cultural grounds, including the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, Kakadu and and Uluru-Kata Tjuta national parks.
WA already has three sites listed for natural values alone: Ningaloo Reef, Shark Bay and Purnululu national park.
The process for Unesco world heritage nomination is a long one. Once the group builds a case, it will need public support to convince the state government to pick up the proposal and in turn lobby the federal government, which can submit the nomination.
A spokeswoman for the WA environment minister, Albert Jacob, said he had not yet received any detail about the proposal.
