Introduction

The Biodiversity Council welcomes the opportunity to provide feedback on the Delivering Tasmania’s Threatened Species Strategy (the Draft Strategy).

Our understanding

The Draft Strategy is intended to be a strategic framework that helps align existing activities, investments and responsibilities for threatened species and guides future actions by government and non-government organisations.

The Draft Strategy has three parts - a vision statement, two guiding approaches and four strategic pillars.

The guiding approaches are prioritisation and collective effort. The four strategic pillars are: protect and restore, partner and engage, building knowledge, and getting the systems right. Each pillar has three long-term aims.

Feedback is specifically sought on whether the Draft Strategy adequately reflects real-world experience and how it can be translated into on-ground action.

The Biodiversity Council supports the broad direction of the Draft Strategy but we are concerned about the lack of a measurable anchor objective for prioritisation (and the prioritisation framework in general), and that the current strategy does not seem to have been formally evaluated to inform development of the new strategy.

Please download our submission for our full analysis, key concerns and recommendations.

Summary of recommendations:

The Biodiversity Council recommends that:

1. “Priority places” be removed, and “priority habitats” and “management of priority threats” be identified as means of achieving recovery of threatened species, not aims in their own right.
2. The Tasmanian Government commits to consultation on the prioritisation framework with global experts.
3. The Draft Strategy set an anchor objective.
4. The Tasmanian government publish an evaluation of the 2000 Strategy and use the findings to inform implementation of the Draft Strategy.
5. The Draft Strategy includes a Program Logic.