WA Today 5 Mar 11;
A new dredging project could kill off threatened dugongs that are already starving from the floods in central Queensland, conservationists say.
Gladstone Ports Corporation announced yesterday it had awarded a $1.3 billion contract to dredge Gladstone Port as part of its plan to become one of the world's major Liquid Natural Gas exporters.
It will be the country's largest dredging project.
Joint venture partners Van Oord and Dredging International Australia are expected to start dredging six million cubic tonnes of material from July.
Marine species policy manager for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Lydia Gibson, said the dredging may be the final straw for marine life already struggling after the floods killed off feeding grounds.
"We know that dugongs along the Queensland coast have lost most of their feeding grounds already after the recent floods," she said.
"The dredging could be a tipping point for dugongs. Although the full impact of the floods is yet to be known, the accumulative impact - this particular development, the floods, and fishing, would be a death of a thousand cuts for Queensland's dugongs."
Ms Gibson said the Queensland government has a study under way into the impact of the floods on marine life and she called on the project to be delayed until the report is in.
"The WWF is encouraging the government to hold off on approving the large scale development, particularly in the habitats of threatened marine species, at least until it's assessed the full impact of the floods on marine animals."
Treasurer Andrew Fraser said stringent environmental conditions had been placed on the project.
"This is to ensure the project has minimal impact on the environs of the Gladstone harbour," he said in a statement.
"The approval contains a stringent set of dredging conditions, monitoring requirements, ecosystem research plus a range of measures to protect and enhance endangered species."
AAP
