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“It’s like playing golf: if you have one club in your bag you are not likely to play a great game of golf. But if you have different clubs in your bag you’ll have a much better game. We need many conservation clubs in our bag. Paleontology and using that to help us translocate species so that they might survive climate change is just one of the clubs to have in the bag,” he said.

“The way we see animals today is inevitably a tiny part of the total story. It’s widely being realised that the business as usual approach is no longer an option and more things are going down the plughole. The world is changing so fast that nature cannot adapt at the same pace.”

The mountain pygmy-possums’ new home includes a research room, nesting boxes and a cool room for food in the hopes of providing a unique environment where the animals can thrive.

Secret Creek Sanctuary chief executive officer and secretary of the Australian Ecosystems Foundation Trevor Evans said while the possum had been discovered in the 1960s, there was still a lot of work going on to understand the animal. While they face many threats, including a declining food source, their biggest threat remains invasive predators, such as foxes, cats and horses.

“All the Australian species are competing with introduced species. Australia needs to choose between wild horses, foxes or cats, and native species. We can’t have both living together,” he says. “A lot of national parks don’t know what animals are disappearing unless you are researching every day. We need to get serious about it and we can’t keep researching things to death, we have the best extinction rate on planet, we need to do proactive intervention.”

Since colonisation, about 100 of Australia’s unique flora and fauna species have been wiped off the planet, including 34 mammals. The rate of loss, which is as comprehensive as anywhere else on Earth, has not slowed over the past 200 years. Last year, the International Union for Conservation of Nature released its Red List, the most comprehensive global inventory of biodiversity, logging 40,084 species at risk of extinction.

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Among the species was the iconic Australian bogong moth, which made its first appearance, as its population has plummeted in the past three years after record-breaking droughts. Australian zoology professor at Sweden’s Lund University Eric Warrant has observed the moth for decades and said they used to coat the walls of alpine caves, but this year there are only a handful of caves where the moths have been found.

He added while conservation efforts usually focused on the cute and cuddly animals, this was slowly changing. But threats like climate change and invasive predators were driving down the moths’ population.

“It is not very clear how we can protect this species. Conservation is usually concentrated on the habitat that an animal needs to reproduce but that’s not an easy task because you’d basically have to protect the entire south-east of Australia. The only thing that will save the moth is to stop burning fossil fuels.”

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