Great Barrier Reef management top class, says UN chief

The UN’s top marine official has praised the Australian government’s management of the Great Barrier Reef.

The UN’s top marine official has praised the Australian government’s management of the Great Barrier Reef and urged ­donors to look beyond green groups and directly support ­UNESCO as an honest broker.

Fanny Douvere, head of the World Heritage Marine Program, said the Great Barrier Reef was a textbook study of how good work could be achieved when the UN acted as a broker between environment groups, scientists and governments.

Ms Douvere led a 2012 UN mission to investigate concerns about the impact of industrial development at Gladstone.

Intervention by the UN led to a comprehensive review of Australia’s reef management and the withdrawal of a threatened in-danger listing by the World Heritage Committee last year.

Writing in Nature, Ms Douvere said Australia was proof that “the most durable solutions emerge when diverse viewpoints of activists, scientists and government officials are effectively mediated”.

Management of the reef has become an election issue following serious bleaching and high coral mortality on reefs off Cape York. Green groups have been campaigning hard for action, but reef authorities and Environment Minister Greg Hunt have expressed concern at how the bleaching data and reef management has been presented.

Ms Douvere said that before the UN involvement in 2012, the reef had suffered as a result of ­decisions being made on an ­incremental basis that threatened “death by a thousand cuts”.

In 2012, the World Heritage Committee issued its first warning that it would list the site as “world heritage in danger” unless it saw proof of substantial progress. “Australia’s government committed more than $200 million to improve water quality and set an ambitious aim to reduce pollution run-off by 80 per cent by 2025,’’ Ms Douvere said.

“Proposed port-development areas have been restricted from 11 to four major ones, and future coastal development must align with a strategic plan aimed at ­improving the health of the reef between now and 2050.”

In his address to the World Heritage Committee last July, Mr Hunt said that UNESCO ­advice had allowed Australia “to do in 18 months what otherwise would have taken decades”.