I was very pleased today to launch an excellent new publication by Rod Randall, from the Weeds CRC, which will be an invaluable tool in the fight against weeds in Australia. It's a book, but it's also free to download online!

Everyone knows that weeds and feral animals - alien invasive species - stand beside habitat destruction and climate change as the main drivers of biodiversity loss worldwide. But many people don't realise how widespread invasive species are in Australia.

We have introduced 28,000 plants in 200 years, and many of them have become weeds which have overwhelmed ecosystems that do not have the capacity to adapt.

In Uluru, for example, 900ha of the park has been invaded by buffel grass, which is leading to the loss of native birds and reptiles as well as a changed fire regime, threatening native plants.

Scientists estimate that the pre-European rate of plant introductions was as little as one to five per century. Is it any wonder that our ecosystems can't cope with the current onslaught.

The good news is that Rod Randall has just listed all the introduced plant species found in Australia now, as well as their weed status. This is a major contribution to the national interest, especially in the light of the fact that recently Bunnings released for distribution around the country a shocking invasive weed, Mexican feathergrass, because it was wrongly labelled.

With Rod's publication, Introduced Flora of Australia and Its Weed Status, there is absolutely no excuse for any retailer to be selling weeds to the public. More importantly, governments, state and federal, need to agree to a mandatory labelling system for all plants sold and also use the new national weeds research centre to develop national regulations so that we don't have the NT Government encouraging the planting of certain grasses while natural resource managers pay people to take them out in other states!

This excellent resource is free and available on the web, and already 230,000 people have visited the site, before it was even officially launched today!

Launching the publication today, it became clear that what we have to do in Australia is prioritise natural resource management as a clear component of mitigation and adaptation in relation to climate change. We have to build resilience in ecosystems so that they can best adapt and best store as much carbon as possible.

The best way of giving all our plants and animals their best chance of survival.

There is potentially a rich source of new jobs here, especially for indigenous Australians in northern Australia, in maintaining ecosystems free of weeds and stopping further incursions. Priorities for governments need to be mandatory labelling and uniform laws across the states and territories, and it is essential that the new national weeds research centre is not only high profile, but an independent centre which links all of the work being done through the CSIRO, Bureau of Rural Science, state departments, universities, research and development corporations and the federal departments. The PM is on notice that this national weeds research centre must not be just part of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, and subsumed in the bureaucracy.

Having been the poor relation for years, protection of biodiversity is rushing on to the global agenda, in the lead up to the UN year of Biodiversity in 2010 and Australia can make a big contribution by promoting the links between all of the key UN conventions - Biodiversity, Desertification, Ramsar, and UNFCCC - through an increased focus on invasive species.