Australia has the reputation as the land of fire. The continent has warmed by almost 1.5°C over the past century and the impact of this on fire offers a sort of window into the future for the Northern Hemisphere. Let's study what impact these forest fires continue to create on the population of Koala in the country.

More than 60,000 koalas were among the animals badly affected by the bushfire crisis, often termed as "Black Summer", in Australia a year ago, according to a report commissioned by the World Wide Fund for Nature-Australia.

Koalas are listed as vulnerable in Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT, but conservation groups are pushing for them to be re-categorised as endangered.

WWF (formerly World Wildlife Fund) estimates 60,000 koalas were impacted by the 2019–20 bushfires alone. But WWF-Australia chief executive Dermot O'Gorman said koalas in NSW and Queensland were in rapid decline long before the fires. A survey conducted in parts of Queensland in 1967 found koalas had disappeared from 37 per cent of sites surveyed.

Source: abc.net.au