The alarming truth is the crowning glory of the world’s coral ecosystems will,under the current global warming trajectory,cease to exist in the form that we know it.
An early season marine heatwave is once again posing a risk of coral bleaching to the Great Barrier Reef. A break in the weather with good cloud cover is needed to reduce the risk.Dean Miller/Great Barrier Reef Legacy
UNESCO scientists on Tuesday to say its climate policies weren’t ambitious enough to significantly reduce the threat global warming poses to the reef and it should be rated as “in danger” of losing World Heritage status.
Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek said the Great Barrier Reef was “one of the best-managed reefs in the world and it doesn’t require an in danger rating by UNESCO ... to make us take it seriously”.
There have been four mass coral-bleaching events in the past six years,the Australian Institute of Marine Science rates the,and another marine heatwave is growing off the Queensland coast.
Nevertheless,Plibersek makes a reasonable point. The Albanese government has raised Australia’s climate target and boosted funding for reef protection.
She’s also right to say it’s unfair for the status of Australia’s natural wonder to be downgraded when the same could be said for every other World Heritage site. Climate change is gnawing away at them all.
But that’s a small point to make when the fact is the reef is in danger.
Climate scientists say Labor’s target to cut emissions by 43 per cent by 2030 is consistent with global action that would cause 2 degrees or more of global warming,and a report by the Australian Academy of Sciences only 1 per cent of corals would survive in their current form.
Plibersek says the government’s 43 per cent target is a “floor not a ceiling”. The government must match this rhetoric with actions.
And it’s not only climate change and coral bleaching that imperils the reef.
Pollution caused by fertiliser,clearing for agriculture and sediment runoff is another key threat.
The Australian Conservation Foundation reported this month that more than 420,000 hectares of mature or advanced regrowth forest more than 15 years old,mapped as likely habitat for threatened wildlife,was wholly or partly cleared in Queensland in 2018-19.
The federal environment minister has powers,under the Environment Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act,to assess and block clearing that could harm threatened species habitat.
In 2018-19,only 4 per cent was assessed by the former Morrison government.
It is up to Plibersek to reverse this trend.
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