Australia's iconic koala will become extinct in some areas of the country if the federal government does not take urgent action, conservationists said Thursday.

A group of Australian scientists will meet with government officials in Canberra today to hammer out a national koala conservation strategy to keep key populations of the animals from dying out.

Less than 100,000 koalas are left in the country, compared to millions before they were heavily hunted for fur in the 1920s, said Deborah Tabart from the Australian Koala Foundation.

"The population of koalas in southeast Queensland has decreased from 10,000 to less than 4,000 in a decade," Tabart said.

The population in the southeast Queensland area known as the Koala Coast has fallen by at least 26 percent to 4,611 animals since a 1996-99 survey as development encroached on their natural habitats. "We know that there are even less now, in the order of 3,800," Tabart said.

Kat Miller of the World Wildlife Fund also warned that koalas could be on their way to extinction along with several other Australian species.

"There are more than 1,700 federally-listed threatened populations of animals in Australia. There is an extinction crisis in Australia. The koala may well be the next one to go downhill."

The Australian Koala Foundation is urging Environment Minister Peter Garrett to declare the southeast Queensland koala population as critically endangered under law in a bid to protect their habitats from further developments.

"This is the most important thing Minister Garrett and his department can do right now to show he is serious about saving the koala," said Tabart.

"These declines just cannot continue if we still want to see our beautiful icon here."

Climate change has also played a role in the decline as it altered the nutritional make-up of their staple food, gumtree leaves, Tabart said.

Post-mortems of around 700 koalas in southeast Queensland have found that most were "wasted" when they died. "The impact of climate change on the nutritional value of eucalyptus leaves has been proven to affect koalas," she said.

Garrett has said he had charged Australia's Threatened Species Scientific Committee with assessing the risk to the koala but warned that he needed to await the committee's report before he could act.

"This is a clear indication of how seriously the Australian government is considering reports from the Australian Koala Foundation and others on diminishing koala numbers in some regions," the minister said.

(China Daily via Agencies December 12, 2008)