The Great Barrier Reef is in rude health — but why let facts get in the way
AIMS states that two of the three major Great Barrier Reef regions have set new records for coral cover, and the cover in the third has equalled the existing record. When you add up the regional results to get the coral cover for the entire reef – something AIMS inexplicably stopped doing in 2016 – the Great Barrier Reef has more coral in each of the past three years than in any of the preceding 35 years.
This is despite the supposedly catastrophic bleaching in 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022 and this year killing huge amounts of coral.
What is even more remarkable is that the types of coral that have flourished – plate and staghorn coral – are the most susceptible to bleaching. But of course AIMS is still arguing these records do not mean the reef is healthy.
One therefore has to ask: what does the reef have to do to get the tick of approval? Australia has just won a record number of medals at the Olympics, which everyone seems to think is good. Why is the Great Barrier Reef always close to death no matter how many medals it wins?
The record coral coverage on the Great Barrier Reef across the past three years is not mentioned in the latest Scientific Consensus Statement, just released by CSIRO. Instead it focuses on claims the reef is badly affected by farmers and that climate change is a great threat. The summary of the statement (alone about 100 pages) acknowledges traditional owners, vilifies farmers and claims that freshwater ecosystems miraculously have become an integral part of the Great Barrier Reef. But somehow it could not find room to mention the reef has record coverage of coral.
Neither was the record coral coverage mentioned by federal Environment and Water Minister Tanya Plibersek in her response to UNESCO when it threatened to list the Great Barrier Reef as endangered. But she sold out the barramundi fishermen in the Gulf of Carpentaria when she agreed to stop gillnet fishing in the gulf to “save the reef”.
That’s a good one. We must protect all the record coral cover on the other side of Cape York by importing even more than the 65 per cent of seafood we already obtain from overseas.
AIMS made a lame attempt in The Conversation to explain how the embarrassing coverage statistics did not mean the reef was fine. Apparently, we need to give it time to die.
Most disappointing is that in the three years of record coral coverage, the scientists and institutions that have been crying wolf about the Great Barrier Reef have never been challenged in the media – except for The Australian, Sky News and some north Queensland media outlets. The rest of the media do not seem to be interested in the truth.
To back up this allegation, the Australian Environment Foundation, where I am chairman, undertook an experiment with a half-dozen journalists and a well-known blogger, including from The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, the ABC and The Saturday Paper. All had published articles bemoaning the terrible state of the Great Barrier Reef. We offered them a trip to the GBR to see it for themselves – all expenses paid.
I would accompany them to explain the great health of the reef, but they also could bring any scientist they wanted from any of the reef science institutions. We suggested those scientists could counter my argument that the reef was fabulous. We even would let the journalists decide which one of the many reefs in the Cairns region to visit. We suggested it would be good to see at least one reef that allegedly had been badly bleached in the latest “catastrophic” bleaching event.
You would think a free trip to the Great Barrier Reef – and an opportunity to document a notorious climate denier being torn to shreds in argument by climate angels – would be too much for them to pass up. But none accepted our invitation. To be fair, a couple of them seemed keen at first, but communications with them soon went dead. I suspect they found that none of the more well-known reef scientists would accept such a challenge.
The Great Barrier Reef institutions do not want to argue about this embarrassing statistic. They prefer to ignore it and hope it will go away. With a complex ecological system such as the reef, the coral cover eventually will fall below its present level. Cyclones far bigger than the two small systems that hit the reef this year will smash the coral and we will go through another period of low coral coverage.
And the reef science institutions doubtless will claim that reduced coverage is a sign of the death of the Great Barrier Reef, just like the record high levels.
Peter Ridd is chairman of the Australian Environment Foundation.
More Coverage
Putin’s choice: Peter the Great or Steve Witkoff
The Australian Institute of Marine Science officially has confirmed what we’ve known for a few weeks: this will be another bumper year for Great Barrier Reef coral cover.