Gunditjmara Traditional Owner Denis Rose has been working to protect Country for more than 40 years.

Involved in the establishment of the Indigenous Protected Areas program in the mid 1990s, Mr Rose is proud to see how much the initiative has grown.

An Indigenous Protected Area is land or sea Country managed by Traditional Owners under an agreement with the federal government for biodiversity conservation.

There are now more than 90 IPAs in Australia covering over 110 million hectares of land and sea Country.

"More than 50 per cent of Australia's total protected areas are IPA's, which is extremely pleasing to see," Mr Rose told AAP.

The work of these Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rangers, who are on the front lines of climate change is invaluable but has, in many ways, gone un

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