Nearly half of Australia is largely untouched by Man, making it one of the biggest wildernesses in the world, ranking alongside the Amazon rainforest and Antarctica, a new study has found.

Three million square kilometres (1.1 million sq miles) — an area 12 times the size of mainland Britain — have been left pristine, according to the report for the Pew Environment Group and Nature Conservancy. Barry Traill, co-author of the study and director of the Wild Australia programme, said: “We were pleasantly surprised that there were still so many areas which came up in such good condition after 200 years of European settlement.”

The other two great remaining wilderness areas in the world are the Sahara and the northern Boreal forest in Canada.

“As the world’s last great wilderness areas disappear under pressure from human impact, to have a continent with this much remaining wilderness intact is unusual and globally significant,” Dr Traill added.

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The study highlighted 12 regions in Australia, from the treeless Nullarbor Plain, which stretches across southern Australia, to the lush rainforests of Cape York in the far north. Although they were found to be rich in flora and fauna there was a high rate of extinction in some species.

Australia had the highest number of endemic mammal and reptile species in the world, Dr Traill said. Some species such as bilbies, rat kangaroos and bandicoots — generally small, ground-dwelling animals — are under threat from feral animals such as wild pigs and water buffalo, as well as from noxious weeds “causing well-documented losses of habitat and wildlife”, the study reported.

“In the past ten years there have been major declines \, especially with some species disappearing completely from particular areas,” Dr Traill said.

Australia has a total land mass of 2,988,902 sq miles (7.7 million sq km) and a population of about 21 million, most of whom live in the capital cities around the coast.

The areas of the Outback highlighted in the report were in central Australia and at the top of Queensland, regions that are predominantly unsettled or under the control of Aboriginal communities. Nearly a quarter of Australia is indigenous freehold land.

Aboriginal people have managed the wilderness land for thousands of years. Dr Traill said that they would need extra resources if they were to maintain the land more efficiently. Some plants such as the noxious weed mimosa, which was introduced by colonial settlers, were destroying the habitat and more help was needed to control them.

The solution to maintain the land, he said, was to provide more active management, such as training more indigenous rangers. There are currently 700 rangers but Dr Traill hopes to train and employ a further 4,300.

“You can have Aboriginal people who own these lands but don’t have the resources to look after them and manage them,” he said. “So one of the things we are getting in place is assisting these Aboriginal ranger groups to get more of them back into the country, into the remote areas, and looking after the land.”

He said that the Wild Australia programme, a collaborative project between the Pew Environment Group, which is based in Washington DC in the US, and the Nature Conservancy, would invest $A12 million (£6 million) — raised over three years from private, conservation-minded donors in the US — in maintaining the wilderness areas.

The money would go towards training indigenous rangers to look after the land, as well as buying properties such as cattle stations and turning them into conservation areas.

Dr Traill said: “These wild, natural areas are an important part of Australia’s heritage, they need to be actively managed.

“By marrying overseas resources with local expertise we aim to make a big difference in looking after our Outback.”

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