‘Ecological grief’: communities, economy suffer from damage to Great Barrier Reef

Ongoing damage to the health and beauty of the Great Barrier Reef by global warming is inevitable, delivering major blows to local communities and the national economy, according to the Commonwealth’s five-yearly health check of Australia’s world heritage-listed coral wonder.

Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority chairman Ian Poiner wrote to Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek about the findings in his agency’s outlook report, which states climate change is the ecosystem’s greatest threat due to the rising intensity and frequency of marine heatwaves causing coral bleaching.

Coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef. Credit: Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

“The overall future outlook for the Great Barrier Reef is ‘very poor’ [the lowest possible rating],” Poiner said.

Before the authority’s previous outlook report in 2019, the reef was hit with mass coral bleaching events in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017. In the five years since then, there were three mass bleaching events – in 2020, 2022 and in the summer of 2024.

Poiner said “urgent national and global action” to reduce warming was the only way to limit the escalating effects of climate change. Bleaching events are now occurring so frequently that corals have less and less time to recover.

“It is imperative that everything possible is done to create recovery windows for the reef,” the report said.

Queensland marine tourism is estimated to be worth $36 billion a year, generating more than 200,000 jobs.

The outlook report said the reef provided a living for hundreds of thousands of people, making a significant contribution to the state and national economies. It found that a healthy reef boosted the mental and physical health of people who interacted with it and contributed to Australia’s national identity.

Damage to the reef, it said, harmed those who valued it: “The flipside of strong place attachment and wellbeing attributed to connection to the reef emerges as ‘ecological grief’, expressed when the reef’s health declines.”

“Ocean warming, sea-level rise and ocean acidification are predicted to worsen over the next decades,” the report said. “While reef ecosystems are resilient and can recover from impacts, increasing occurrences of widespread coral bleaching are exceeding the limits of tolerance of reef organisms to climate change.”

Of the past 400 years, the six hottest years for sea surface temperatures on the Great Barrier Reef have occurred since 2016, according to an Australian study, Highest ocean heat in four centuries places Great Barrier Reef in danger, published this month.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body for assessing global warming, has found that if global average temperatures – which are currently 1.1 degrees above the pre-industrial average – rise by 1.5 degrees, then 70 to 90 per cent of the world’s coral reefs will die. If warming reaches 2 degrees, it predicts 99 per cent of coral reefs will die.

Australian Marine Conservation Society Great Barrier Reef campaigner Lissa Schindler said the Albanese government should increase its action to cut emissions, which is currently consistent with global action that will cause 2 degrees of warming.

“Action to tackle climate change was rated ‘ineffective’ [in the outlook report], while actions to address major localised threats, poor water quality and fishing were rated only partially effective,” Schindler said.

Biodiversity Council member and University of Queensland coastal ecosystems expert Professor Catherine Lovelock said that next to climate action, the best thing governments could do was invest in wetland protections and revegetate stream banks and gullies to reduce sediment run-off from farmland. These things enhanced water quality and would help the reef recover.

“The outlook report provides all the evidence needed to follow this strategy. Let’s cut through the governance quagmire and get to it,” Lovelock said.

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