The latest Outlook for the world’s greatest coral reef – Australia’s own Great Barrier Reef – give politicians some wiggle room to foster hope that the dire condition of the Reef is improving. But this snapshot of Reef health was taken just before it was hit with a killer blow. This Reef may no longer have the resilience to get up off the floor. (Yet we still maintain it’s ‘the world’s best managed reef’)
‘How’s it going on the Reef?’
Glad you asked. Some politicians are claiming the Reef is fine while almost every coral scientist is saying the Reef is in steep decline. How could this be?
Of course, THE Reef in question can only be Australia’s GREAT Barrier Reef, a piece of natural heritage that Australian governments swore to protect over four decades ago when it was added to the World Heritage register for its outstanding natural values (the first coral reef to be placed on the list).
The latest overview
As to how it’s going, well, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has just released a 600-page, 5-yearly Outlook Report (2024) providing the most authoritative and up-to-date overview of the condition of the GBR, and it finds that things are improving in a few areas. The condition of some coral species has improved over the past five years; species such as seabirds, sharks, rays, dugongs and seagrasses have recovered in some areas; and populations of estuarine crocodiles are recovering.
This has enabled some conservative politicians to pour cold water on all the doom and gloom talk we’ve been hearing about the decline of the Reef. Nationals MP Keith Pitt, for example, came out saying the Great Barrier Reef is in “really good condition” contrary to what the nay sayers have been claiming. While Senator Malcolm Roberts chimed in with “Great Barrier never better”. (Yes, these guys are renowned climate deniers and they would say this but it reflects a lot of the chatter happening in the sphere of social media and right wing main stream media.)
But, before you start popping the champagne, there are some important caveats in the Outlook Report conveniently overlooked by the reef optimists. Where it says “the condition of some coral species has improved over the past five years”, it’s referring to a few fast-growing coral species that have done quite well in recent years. Unfortunately, these same species are particularly sensitive to overheating and vulnerable during bleaching events.
The ‘update’ is already out of date
Which leads to the second possibly more significant caveat. The Outlook Report is based on data up to the end of 2023. It doesn’t include any detail on the mass bleaching event that began in February 2024, and this event will probably go down as the worst the Reef has experienced (so far that is, worse is coming down the line because we’re not doing anything meaningful about carbon pollution and rising temperatures).
Leading coral scientist Terry Hughes says the data is still coming in on this year’s bleaching however: “We know from the satellite data that the heat stress in 2024 was more extreme, more widespread than any of the previous bleaching events.”
So, the latest Outlook report is already out of date and to some extent misleading. Though, unlike what some politicians claim, the report never said the Reef was in ‘really good shape’; rather it said that for the time frame it was looking at, the last five years, the condition of some coral species has moved from “very poor” to “poor”, recovering from earlier bleaching events. (There have been mass bleaching events in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020 and 2022.)
King hit
Think of a boxer who is being whipped in a fight. This boxer is knocked down and struggling to get back up. He’s not dead, and if he’s given enough time he might recover. But he’s not thriving, his condition is very poor. The referee calls time out, the boxer regains his breath and starts to stand up; his condition has gone from very poor to just poor. The fight resumes and he’s hit again, but this time harder.
This is what’s happening on the Reef. Each bleaching event is knocking the life out of the system. If the Reef is given some respite from the blows it should recover, but instead the blows are coming faster and harder as global warming ramps up. At a certain point, maybe even the blow it’s just received, it won’t be getting back up again ever, it’ll be replaced by a new system that doesn’t involve hard corals. Maybe it will be based on algal reefs as has occurred in the Caribbean.
So, the Great Barrier Reef was showing some small signs of recovery but now it’s had the stuffing kicked out of it again, and the best most authoritative government overview we have on its condition can’t even keep up with its decline. Worse, because our government is responsible for sustaining its World Heritage values, that same overview is framed to suggest that it’s still okay, it can still get up off the floor.
But it’s resilient, isn’t it?
As Terry Hughes phrases it: “And there’s always an argument put in the Outlook reports, that although the trajectory is bad and the outlook is worse, the Barrier Reef is resilient, and its World Heritage outstanding ‘universal values’ are somehow intact.”
Once again, when the chips are down and things look bleak, the pollies hide behind the concept of resilience, as if it were some form of magical potion that can revitalise the dead.
Another claim made in this and previous Outlook reports is that the Great Barrier Reef is the ‘best managed reef in the world’. This is based on the fact that two decades ago the government, using the best available systematic conservation planning, ‘fenced off’ around a third of the Reef to fishing to protect its ecosystem integrity, the source of its resilience. Maybe it is one of the best managed reefs in the world, it certainly absorbs a lion’s share of the available conservation funding available in Australia; but the threats it now faces (first and foremost in the form of global warming) are overwhelming its resilience. And it’s not just the GBR at risk. Coral reefs around the world are in decline.
This is the fourth Outlook report on the GBR following in the footsteps of many reports and science papers over at least a quarter of a century – all carrying the same basic message: coral reefs are at risk in a warming world, if we want to save them we need to reign in carbon emissions. The warnings have been ignored, carbon emissions are still rising, and now we are witnessing the decline and death of these important ecosystems.
The writing is on the wall, the body is on the floor; it’s still breathing but it’s unlikely it’ll be able to get back up much longer.
Banner image: Bleached coral on the Great Barrier Reef. The Government’s latest Outlook report suggests some corals on the ‘the world’s best managed reef’ are recovering (moving from “very poor” to “poor” condition). Unfortunately, the Outlook is based on data prior to the mass bleaching of 2024, likely to go down as the worst on record. (Image Oregon State University, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)
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