The State of the Environment report, the latest five-year government snapshot, makes for generally dismal reading leavened only by occasional modest aspects on the improve.

Certainly, the independently researched study in places cuts to the chase: "Our natural environment makes human life possible, and our cultural environment helps define who we are."

On that score, we must be defined as greedy, wilful myopes, hell-bent on running our natural assets into the ground (or the sea-bed).

Yes, air-quality in cities has generally improved and areas under protection in the National Reserve System have increased to an estimated 19.2 per cent of Australia, or about 147.48 million hectares, up from 17.9 per cent in 2014.

However, the main pressures are unchanged from the previous 2011 report and most are getting worse.

On the simple measure of nationally threatened species and ecological communities, the list gets ever longer. In the past five years, 30 new ecological communities are gone on the list, as have, 44 animal and five plant species.  (See chart below of the mammals known to be extinct.)

Two species have been reported as likely extinct, including the Bramble Cay melomys (Melomys rubicola) and the Christmas Island forest skink (Emoia nativitatis). The former is believed to be the first such mammal extinction from climate change.

'Irreversible'

Indeed the impacts of climate change, which the report notes at length, "are likely to worsen, and some of these impacts may be irreversible".

While overall temperatures have risen about 1 degree over the past century, the pace is much faster in some areas. Australia's south-west and south-east marine regions are warming fastest - at 0.4 degrees per decade between 1982 and 2015.

Despite the importance of climate change, the report reveals a huge reduction in spending on such programs:

More broadly, the report hints at the failure of governments in general to fund environmental care in all its needs. No single estimate is available of what that cost might be but the figure "is likely to be beyond the scope of traditional sources" - shorthand for "don't ask the treasury".

Queensland woes

The Great Barrier Reef attracts due attention for the big bleaching event in 2016 as water temperatures got an El Nino boost in addition to the background warming to trigger widespread coral mortality. 

However, as we have seen in recent weeks, another bout of bleaching appears to be unfolding even without an El Nino, underscoring how close to thresholds existing eco-systems are.

Other pressures on the precious natural treasure also appear to suggest that in the tussle between economic growth and the environment, there is usually only one winner. 

"Approximately 10 per cent of the shoreline within the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area now comprises human-made structures (e.g. breakwalls, pontoons, jetties) - an increase of 70 per cent in some areas in the past three years," the report states (italics added).

And that's before any of the giant coal mines proposed for Queensland's Galilee Basin get developed.

On such subjects, the SoE report is all but silent, noting such proposals there and in the Hunter Valley are "controversial... in part on the basis of their environmental impacts, including on-ground impacts, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions associated with combustion and, for the Galilee Basin, the potential risks of contamination of the Great Barrier Reef as a result of shipping from the Abbott Point Terminal".

Coal seam gas also gets a few paragraphs despite its impact in Queensland adding to "existing ecologically threatening processes - such as fragmentation, clearing, increased invasive species and changed fire regimes – in a region that is already highly disturbed.

No mention is made in the report of increasing evidence that CSG brings other risks such migratory emissions of methane that may blow a hole in Australia's greenhouse emissions goals.

Land-clearing expands

Queensland is also singled out it for its increased land clearing during the past five years, mostly during the Liberal-Nationals Party government of Campbell Newman.

"[[Queensland's] clearing of woody vegetation, primarily for pasture, increased by 73 per cent in 2012–13 from 2011–12 and by a further 11 per cent from 2012–13 to 2013–14, the report noted. 

The report touched on the fact that NSW and Western Australia are heading down the same path, noting: "Weakening legislation relating to clearing of native vegetation has adverse implications for vegetation extent, condition and connectivity, and for biodiversity."

Despite the detail given to Australia's global warming risks, the report makes the most cursory of assessments of the Abbott-Turnbull's climate policies. The $2.55 billion Emissions Reduction Fund, despite being described as the "centrepiece" of current policies escapes scrutiny save for a mention "that effectiveness of these policies has been questioned".

That's despite most sectors of the economy are showing rising emissions - when they should be falling - and many other indicators pointing to the "Direct Action's" failure such as paying landfill operators $200 million for nothing. (See Australian Conservation Foundation chart below of main emissions.)

Relatively good years

Also, skating lightly over the economics is the report's summary on the $10 billion Murray-Darling Basin Plan and its impacts. 

Yes, the federal government lifted its holdings of environmental water from 993 gigalitres in 2010-11 to 2410 GL in 2015-16, and managed to deliver 5400 GL so far. The plan has "contributed to ecological benefits for stream functioning and biodiversity", the report notes.

But as noted last week in a report by Quentin Grafton, director of the ANU Centre for Water Economics at Crawford School, spending of $5 billion had produced little to show at a basin-level scale.

"You'd expect to get more than no discernible improvement," Grafton told Fairfax Media on Tuesday.

Worse, all that spending has happened over the past five years when rainfall had generally been better than the previous drought-hit period covered in the 2011 State of the Environment report. 

"It's still a highly risky, highly vulnerable system whose resilience has not been restored," he says. "What happens in the next drought?"