Wildlife road strike is a crisis in Australia with 10 million animals killed on our roads every year, which equates to 19 animals killed every minute. This is a tragedy for conservation, the welfare of animals and for the everyday Australians who drive on our roads. 

Action is urgently needed to address this crisis and the ACT should become a leader in developing and implementing effective wildlife collision mitigation measures to reduce the rate of collisions with wildlife on our roads. Rather than simply responding to wildlife injuries after they occur, the focus must shift toward proactive strategies that stop collisions from happening in the first place. This means embedding wildlife protection into every stage of road design, planning, public education, and legislative reform.

Despite Canberra being a hotspot, the ACT Government has done very little in the way of wildlife collision mitigation measures and has also rejected pushes from the community to trial different measures, including virtual fencing. 

In June 2025, SCK member, Aisha Bottrill, put forward a petition asking the ACT Government to trial virtual fencing on one of Canberra’s roads. Virtual fencing is a wildlife collision mitigation measure that has worked in places like Eurobodalla Shire and on Victoria’s Surf Coast. The petition received strong community support and lots of media attention including from ABC, Region Media, Yahoo News and the Canberra Times. Despite this, the ACT Government rejected the petition and did not commit to doing anything.

Save Canberra’s Kangaroos continues to advocate for the ACT Government to implement wildlife collision mitigation measures, on all of the roads that are considered a hotspot, as a matter of urgency.

Data on the number of call-outs to rangers for wildlife collisions can be viewed here. However, it is important to note that this would not be a full representation of the scale of wildlife collisions in Canberra as this data is purely based on when a ranger has been called to attend. Even the ACT Government has admitted that the real figure could be twice as many with many collisions unreported and many animals escaping from the road, injured and likely dying without anyone ever finding them. In our submission on the new Draft Kangaroo Management Plan, Save Canberra’s Kangaroos recommended that the ACT Government must consider the establishment of a centralised, publicly accessible wildlife roadstrike data collection system database, in conjunction with and for adoption by all. This system should integrate data from wildlife rescuer groups, insurance claims, council reports, police data and individual wildlife rescuer call-outs, ensuring data method consistency and transparency, and ‘single point of truth’ data curation.