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Habitat destruction, over-exploitation of natural resources, invasive species, pollution and emergent diseases - the previous horsemen of the Apocalypse - have been joined by a huge new one, the impact of which threatens to dwarf all the others.

It is, of course, climate change.

The new challenge is for zoos to consider how they can help, amid expectations that an extra third of global species will be under threat of climate-driven extinction by mid-century.

Given our own urgent environmental issues, Adelaide is therefore a very worthy host of this week's meeting of the world's zoo and conservation leaders.

We need to rise to the challenge of what zoos - in particular and quite uniquely - can do about these issues. That raises a particular irony. Zoos have been criticised, rightly at times, for removing animals from the wild.

Now, incredibly - and for the first time - we can say that not only is there a conservation imperative (that is, species will otherwise disappear) but quality of life is often going to be better for some animals in zoos than in the wild.

The zoo community is pre-eminently suited to emphasise the global dimensions of conservation.

We alone operate across the whole spectrum, from ex-situ breeding of threatened species, research, public education, training and influencing and advocacy, through to in-situ support of species, populations and their habitats.

And we have a massive "captive audience" of visitors - more than 600 million a year globally and 14 million in Australia.

This is more than organised sport musters.

So those of us who work in zoos are talking this week and through the year not only about the role we must play but of how we motivate
and inspire the community to care, too.

It's tempting in a global credit crisis to underplay the impact of climate change. But that won't do, unless we're happy as a generation to leave a world not only without wild tigers and pandas
and others but with a pending ecological and environmental collapse that threatens human survival. Think of us as a pest species fouling our nest.

There are so many things that zoos need to do. Not least of these is to boost significantly our spending and efforts on habitat management and other direct conservation work.

We have to look beyond just the "charisma creatures" to the invertebrates and frogs to small, brown, nocturnal mammals and obscure freshwater fish and to still-unrecognised plants and
soil organisms.

And we need to examine our own "footprint", what energy we use in zoos, what we do with waste, how we transport people, what we sell in our shops and cafes.

Put simply, we have to set an example.