In Western Australia, Ancient Culture and Rich Biodiversity Need Protection

Editor's Note: This article was updated on February 7, 2024, to add a map of the area discussed.

In the remote Outback of Western Australia lies a landscape of stark extremes—the Pilbara, where ancient stories scribed on red rocks have survived thousands of years of scorching days, freezing nights and ferocious cyclones. It’s a place where summer temperatures frequently soar over 40°C (104°F) and where desiccating drought can yield to catastrophic flooding with little warning.

Despite these conditions, the Pilbara—around 1,200 kilometres (745 miles) north of Perth—is also rich in biodiversity. The region, which is roughly the size of Spain, is home to at least 4,000 species of plants and animals, many of which are found nowhere else on Earth, and scientists continue to discover new ones regularly.

But much of this biodiversity faces threats from a combination of industrial activity, invasive species, over-grazing, monocropping, and increasingly frequent and intense wildfires. And only 6.4 per cent of the region is under state-managed conservation reserves, while 80 per cent is under mining and pastoral tenures.

Mining is particularly prominent in the Pilbara: It has one of the world’s most lucrative iron ore mining operations, which—alongside a strong pastoral tradition—is a key economic driver not only for Western Australia but also for the entire country. In fact, mining and related construction in the Pilbara generates more revenue than the economies of two-thirds of the world’s countries.

Of course, this activity takes a toll. A 2012 study by the Australian science agency CSIRO found that without intervention, a quarter of threatened species in the Pilbara were likely to be functionally lost within 20 years. That intervention must address the full suite of threats, while protecting the livelihoods of the people who call this region home.

The Pilbara’s ancient landscape of red dirt and towering rocks has been home to Aboriginal people for more than 50,000 years—one of the world’s longest continuing cultures. Evidence of this history is engraved in the cliffs, buttes and caves: Pilbara has one of the highest concentrations of rock art in the world, created by peoples who settled the region more than 2,000 generations ago.

Compared to the land and other life forms, however, this culture is still a newcomer: The Pilbara sits on what’s believed to be one of the oldest pieces of the Earth’s crust, at 3.6 billion years old, and has served as an ancient refuge for life during glacial periods and a major centre for the evolution of unique plants and animals. Fossilised remains of microbial colonies are embedded in the rockface—evidence of some of the earliest signs of life on Earth.

Dan Proud

The best path to securing protection of the Pilbara is through conservation partnerships among government, industry, Indigenous groups (known locally as Traditional Owners) and landholders. This approach has already been proved elsewhere in Australia, although not at such scale, or in a landscape with such complex overlapping rights and interests. But it’s precisely this complexity that drives the need for thoughtful groups of partners to work together to restore, conserve and protect this landscape.

One such partnership has already formed: The Pilbara Cultural Land Management Project is a multi-year program that empowers Pilbara Traditional Owners to take the lead in caring for their land and cultural heritage. Bringing together 12 Traditional Owner groups, the project aims to establish shared governance and improve the technical capabilities and skills of the groups to support environmental and cultural land management. Funded through a combination of state and federal governments, private investment and philanthropic funds, the project aims to foster sustainable environmental and cultural land monitoring.

In practice, this takes the form of controlling weeds and feral species, restoring and protecting the landscape, caring for sacred sites and knowledge transfer with elders—all led and run by local Indigenous people. This partnership and others like it can diversify the local economy, generate new jobs and increase local prosperity, while reversing environmental decline and sustaining Traditional Owner cultures.

Working with local partners, Pew is committed to ensuring that the Pilbara region becomes a leading example of how to achieve landscape-scale conservation with involvement and buy-in from Traditional Owners, miners, landholders and government. If this can succeed in protecting a thriving natural environment in one of the harshest, yet most biodiverse, regions of Australia’s Outback, it indeed could work in many other places around the country, and the world.

Tim Nicol is a project director and Bill Kruse is an officer with The Pew Charitable Trusts’ protecting Australia’s nature project.