The five-day cull in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands – home to about 2,300 indigenous people in the northwest of South Australia – is the first in the state, local media reported.

“These (camel) groups are putting pressure on the remote Aboriginal communities in the APY Lands and the pastoral operations as the camels search for water,” the APY Lands executive committee said in a statement.

South Australia’s environment department, which is supporting the aerial cull, said the drought had also created “critical animal welfare issues” as some camels have died of thirst or trampled each other as they rush to find water.

“In some cases, dead animals have contaminated important water sources and cultural sites,” a spokesperson added.

Camels were first introduced to Australia in the 1840s to aid in the exploration of the continent’s vast interior, with up to 20,000 imported from India in the six decades that followed.

Australia is now thought to have the largest wild camel population in the world, with official estimates suggesting more than one million are roaming the country’s inland deserts.

The animals are considered a pest, as they foul water sources and trample native flora while foraging for food over vast distances each day.

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Traditional owners in the APY Lands have for years mustered and sold feral camels but more recently they have “been unable to manage the scale and number of camels that congregate in dry conditions”, according to the environment department.

As a result, “up to 10,000 camels will be destroyed in accordance with the highest standards of animal welfare”, it added.

Public broadcaster ABC reported the animals would be killed away from communities and the carcasses burned.

As many as 1 billion animals may have been killed in Australia’s bush fires since September, a scientist said, doubling his earlier estimate as the unprecedented scale of the crisis in the world’s driest inhabited continent continued to emerge.

New figures released on Wednesday by the University of Sydney’s Chris Dickman indicate more than 800 million animals have been killed in the state of New South Wales alone, while one billion had died nationally.

That includes mammals, birds and reptiles directly killed by the fires or indirectly through loss of habitat.

“We’re probably looking at what climate change may look like for other parts of the world in the first stages in Australia at the moment,” said Dickman in a statement on the university’s website.

The professor in ecology in the school of environmental science noted that events such as these may hasten the extinction process for a range species. “It’s a very sad time,” he added.

Distressing images of injured or dead Australian native animals – including koalas and kangaroos – have been flooding social media streams as the wildfires sweep through southeastern Australia, destroying vast tracts of land and homes. The human death toll stands at 25.

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More than 10 million hectares (25 million acres) have been destroyed so far – that’s larger than the US state of Indiana – while smoke from the fires has spread halfway across the globe, darkening skies in Argentina and into the Atlantic.

The fires are so large, they are generating their own weather systems and causing dry lightning strikes that in turn ignite more blazes.

Koalas have been particularly affected, according to Environment Minister Sussan Ley who told local radio on Saturday that up to 30 per cent of the population on the mid-north coast of New South Wales may have been killed.

“With the type of fast-moving crown fires that we have been experiencing, koalas really have no capacity to move fast enough to get away,” Dickman said earlier.

“There is such a big area now that is still on fire and still burning that we will probably never find the bodies.”