Records Tumbling Across South Australia As Drought Intensifies; Even Native Trees Dying With Rainfall Down 80% From Avg
Usually hardy trees and shrubs are dying, waterways have turned to dust and ecologists fear local freshwater fish extinctions could be coming as historic dry conditions grip parts of South Australia. Large swathes of the state – including the Adelaide Plains, the Fleurieu, Yorke and Eyre peninsulas and upper south-east – have seen the lowest rainfall on record in the 14 months since February 2024, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.
“The one thing we need more than anything else is rain,” the state premier, Peter Malinauskas, said last week. Off the back of the state’s driest summer since 2018-19, this year weather stations across Adelaide, Mount Barker and Mount Lofty have recorded just 20% of their usual rain. Adelaide typically gets 64mm from January to March, but this year only 14mm fell. Mount Barker, 33km to the city’s south-east, saw only 15mm compared to its average 83mm.
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Dr Stefan Caddy-Retalic, an ecologist at the University of Adelaide, says many tree species were showing signs of deterioration and stress such as dead limbs, excessive leaf scorching or sprouting new shoots from the base due to the “ratcheting” effects of lower rainfall, higher temperatures and development that encroached on tree roots. As the city’s climate continued to shift from warm mediterranean to semi-arid due to global heating, a lot of the introduced trees people associated with Adelaide – like jacarandas, plane trees and oaks – and some natives, such as grey box, will continue to struggle, he says, with potentially devastating consequences for the animals that rely on them for food and habitat.
The ecologist Derek Sandow, of the Northern and Yorke Landscape Board, who manages the Marna Banggara project to rewild southern parts of the peninsula, says even usually hardy native trees looked almost ready to give up. “You walk through the bush and you see the bigger gum trees are dropping everything, bark, twigs, anything they don’t need to keep growing.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/16/south-australia-historic-dry-weather-parched-waterways-dead-fish-and-trees-ready-to-give-up