44 1GM Saturday August 1 2020 | the times
Wo r l d
ing animals that need trees, were par-
ticularly badly hit.
Professor Dickman’s latest re-
search, published in a report for
WWF, was an attempt to estimate the
effect on other animals that are less
well studied. According to his calcu-
lations, the fires displaced or killed
143 million mammals, 2.46 billion
reptiles, 180 million birds, and 51 mil-
lion frogs. One of his conclusions isthat it is not devastating for all
animals. “The specialists are finding
it hard,” he said. “The generalist spe-
cies, that really aren’t too fussy about
the kinds of food or shelter they have,
will probably be OK.”
The problem is, the most generalist
of all aren’t even natives. Among the
first colonisers of the charred wastes
were feral cats — come to feed on the
corpses.Tsitsi Dangarembga
was arrested at a rallyFew people care about the yellow-
bellied glider. It may be interesting
enough, as it soars between tree tops,
but, in the hierarchy of Australian
fauna, it is no kangaroo or koala.
It was no surprise then that when
fires ravaged Australian wildlife, it
was the marsupials, rather than the
rabbit-sized glider, that became the
harrowing face of the devastation.
In images published across the
world the charred corpses of kanga-
roos and disfigured faces of koalas be-
came emblematic of the worst bush
fires most people can remember. But
as Australia assesses the damage
from the fires, which are estimated to
have killed or displaced 3 billion
animals, the plight of these yellow-
bellied possums illustrates perhaps
better still the devastation wreaked
— and just how long it will take to re-
pair. Scientists believe it may take 100
years before that fauna can recover,
assuming no such devastation as the
latest bushfires occur.
These animals need not just trees
to live, but trees with hollows in. This
means not only that the trees need to
regrow for them to return. They also
Animal habitats destroyed for 100 years by fire
need to reach maturity, then become
gnarled and aged. Yet in many of the
forests where they once lived, the
trees with hollows, trees that normal-
ly survive fires, are dead — and start-
ing to rot away. Soon, they will be
gone and scientists worry it will take
a lifetime to replace them.
“The forests are used to fire, and
normally recover,” Chris Dickman,
from the University of Sydney, said.
This time, through a combination of
record heat and record dry, the fires
burnt very hot. He said: “It killed a lot
of trees and the canopies were com-
pletely obliterated.
“When the trees fall over and they
decline, it may well be a century
before the trees have grown big
enough to regenerate hollows these
species can use.”
The yellow-bellied gliders are not
the only creatures that the Australian
government has identified as at parti-
cular risk after the fires, which razed
an area almost the size of Britain.
Many other species of amphibian,
reptile and bird use hollows. Many
insects rely on rotten wood that also
takes a human lifetime to replenish.
Many marsupials live on those in-
sects. And, conservationists have said
this week, given that the extreme cir-Australia
Tom Whipple Science Editor
The world focused on kangaroos and koalas but the habitats of many species were destroyed with no hope of an early recoveryJOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGEScumstances that caused such de-
struction are, with climate change, no
longer so extreme, in practice these
forests may never fully recover.
While fires are common in Austra-
lia’s forests, the ferocity and scale of
this summer’s were not. On Kanga-
roo Island, a unique habitat off the
south coast, as much as a half of the
island burnt, killing thousands of
koalas, which, like other slow-mov-A plan by Zimbabwe’s government to
end years of acrimony with a $3.5 bil-
lion compensation deal for land sei-
zures has been rejected as “a dead
duck” by the most prominent white
farmer, who said that he “would
rather be allowed to grow food”.
With an economy in freefall and
empty state coffers, the only means of
funding a deal agreed this week to re-
imburse more than 4,000 dispos-
sessed white landowners would be
with Zimbabwe’s first international
bond sale, the finance minister said.
Ben Freeth, 50, whose homestead
was burnt down when his land was
taken in 2009, described the pact
between the government and the big-
gest commercial farmers’ union as
“little more than a propaganda exer-
cise” by a desperate regime. Since the
contract had not been signed off in
parliament and the state’s controls
would forbid any compensation
being paid in foreign currency, inves-
tors buying the debt would not easily
be found, he said.
“Is this government really ex-
pecting the international com-
munity to dip into its pockets to
help out a few white farmers in
Africa?” he said. “The West also
doesn’t want to fund starving
Africans every year, but the
means to get us back to feeding
ourselves and our neigh-
bours is right there.”
Mr Freeth, who wasJustin Trudeau has denied any role in
awarding a government contract
worth more than £530 million to a
charity that has paid speaking fees to
members of his family.
Mr Trudeau, 48, did not recuse
himself from the decision to pick We
Charity to run the national student
volunteer programme, even though it
had paid C$250,000 (£140,000) to his
mother, Margaret, 71, and C$32,000
to his brother Alexandre, 46, since- Mr Trudeau has often attended
We events, and his wife, Sophie, hosts
one of its podcasts. The contract has
since been cancelled.
Mr Trudeau told MPs: “The public
service recommended We Charity. I
did absolutely nothing to influence
that recommendation.” He did add: “I
should have recused myself.”
The ethics commissioner has be-
gun an investigation into the episode,
which could cost Mr Trudeau his
finance minister, Bill Morneau,
whose daughter works for We.
Mr Morneau, 57, a multimillion-
aire, said that he had just repaid
C$41,000 to We in travel expenses for
private family trips to its projects in
Kenya and Ecuador.
Stéphanie Chouinard, a politics
professor at the Royal Military Col-
lege in Kingston, Ontario, said that it
played in to “a narrative that this gov-
ernment is led by a lot of privileged,
wealthy people who don’t understand
the woes of real Canadians”.
PM denies
doing favour
for charity
Canada
Charlie Mitchell OttawaWe just want our land
back, say white farmers
born in Kent and is fighting for the
right to return to the land he worked,
said that it was “tragic” to see experi-
enced farming friends and skilled
employees “twiddling their thumbs
in town” while more than half of the
country’s 15 million people faced star-
vation. He added that he would
rather see the return of the rule of law
and guaranteed property rights and
get back to working the land than
reparations and other white farmers
would too.
“If we had that Zimbabwe could
return to feeding itself, exporting and
thriving, but this compensation deal
is going to do nothing whatsoever to-
wards that. It won’t bring a starving
population out of starvation or the
economy back to recovery,” he said.
Political and economic turmoil,
which has left shortages of every-
thing from cash to medicine, can be
traced to the land seizures that began
in 2000 under Robert Mugabe, who
said that they were necessary to
empower landless black people.
Protests planned to mark the
second anniversary of President
Mnangagwa’s election are un-
likely to help the govern-
ment’s efforts to boost the
confidence of would-be
investors.
The novelist Tsitsi Dan-
garembga, 61, was arrested
during protests days after
she was nominated for
the Booker prize. Wit-
nesses said that she
was bundled in to a
lorry in the capital
Harare by armed
police in riot gear.Zimbabwe
Jane Flanagan Cape Town