UN plots rough water for reef

Inscribing the Great Barrier Reef on the list of World Heritage properties “in danger” would be an ignominious outcome given the billions of dollars and mountains of goodwill that have been applied to safeguarding what is unquestionably one of the nation’s greatest environmental assets. Australia’s efforts to respond to World Heritage concerns and improve stewardship of the GBR have been recognised by UNESCO but in the end have been judged not to be enough. The Morrison government is right to argue for the draft recommendation in favour of an “in danger” listing to be amended before the issue goes to a vote of the World Heritage Committee at its meeting in China from July 16. Australia says the draft decision was made without proper consultation or scientific process and goes against assurances that the issue would not be considered at this year’s meeting. The issue was scheduled for discussion last year but that meeting was postponed because of the pandemic. Some believe there has been undue influence from China, whose officials hold senior positions in the UNESCO process. This includes chair of the World Heritage Committee, deputy director-general of UNESCO, president of UNESCO’s International Union for Conservation for Nature and head of Asia at the World Heritage Centre. All have been involved in making the recommendation for the upcoming World Heritage Committee meeting that the GBR be put on the in-danger list.

The reality is UNESCO has held grave concerns about the status of and outlook for the Great Barrier Reef for more than a decade. These concerns stemmed initially from plans by the Queensland government to allow unrestricted industrial development along the coastline. Once involved, the list of concerns has grown. Great efforts have been applied towards restricting development, limiting the impact of farm and urban run-off and other measures to build reef resilience. Billions of dollars have been spent, but in a series of government-backed reports the trend for the reef continues to be down. There will always be arguments about the cyclical nature of the life of coral reefs and the extent to which the sheer size of the GBR gives it added resilience to bounce back from natural events. But the expert opinion on which the World Heritage Committee has made its decision is clear. A major point was the findings of the 2019 Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s Outlook Report that found the reef’s long-term outlook had deteriorated from poor to very poor, that the deterioration of the ecological processes underpinning the outstanding universal value of the property had been more rapid and widespread than was previously evident, and that the property had suffered significantly from mass coral bleaching events in 2016, 2017 and last year.

The overriding concern of reef scientists is that climate change poses an existential threat to the future of coral reefs worldwide. It seems clear that UNESCO is intent on using the GBR for a bigger purpose. The draft recommendation is for the World Heritage Committee to request Australia to invite a joint World Heritage Centre-IUCN Reactive Monitoring mission to “collaboratively develop a set of corrective measures” to remove the in-danger listing. It says corrective measures should “focus on ensuring that the Reef 2050 Plan’s policy commitments, targets and implementation adequately address the threat of climate change and water quality”. Involving UNESCO in management of the reef will pose difficult questions for Australia and could be an unacceptable intrusion into what are properly sovereign decisions and rights. UNESCO says Australia “on its own cannot address the threats of climate change”. This newspaper has argued consistently that climate change is a global challenge. Meeting the Paris Agreement targets to protect the GBR from climate change will require cuts to greenhouse gas emissions that are beyond Australia’s capacity to deliver. We agree with UNESCO that all countries must act to “fulfil their responsibility to protect” the GBR.