Impacts of Natural and Man-Made Disasters on Wildlife: Planning, Protection and Outcomes
A special issue of Animals (ISSN 2076-2615). This special issue belongs to the section "Animal Welfare".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2021) | Viewed by 10046
Special Issue Editor
2. Veterinary Director Animals Australia, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Interests: animal welfare; ethics, regulatory process; one health; climate crisis; Australian wildlife; conservation
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The Australian bushfires of 2019-20 razed huge tracts of land, killed more than 30 people, and destroyed some 6000 homes. It has also been conservatively estimated that 1 billion native animals were lost including threatened and iconic species, with this figure excluding invertebrates.
While all these losses were deeply shocking to the Australian psyche and to people worldwide, media images of injured, burnt wildlife has led to a major shift in how many Australians view wild animals. There was anger and shock that, unlike livestock, there was largely an absence of plans and sufficient resourcing to deal with the suffering of wildlife. Only one Australian jurisdiction, South Australia, has a state emergency response that incorporates a formal veterinary response plan that includes wildlife, and that was activated in the recent megafires.
The gap between the conservation of animals at a species level, and individual animal welfare has never been clearer. Given the predicted increase in frequency and severity of extreme weather events and natural hazards due to climate change, and Environmental pollution is becoming more and more serious, a more integrated multi-disciplinary approach is urgently needed.
The aim of this Special Edition is to help bridge this gap by building on the existing animals in emergencies’ literature, but with a strong collaborative focus. We welcome manuscripts from multidisciplinary fields including veterinary science, conservation biology, human psychology, and occupational health and safety. We especially invite researchers, clinicians, emergency managers and others who Engaged in animal protection, behavioral research to submit their learnings from the field.
Dr. Jennifer Hood
Guest Editor
Keywords
- Wildlife
- Bushfires
- Emergency response
- Conservation
- Animal welfare
- Threatened species
