The announcement of a marine park network is unlikely to calm the worries of Great Barrier Reef conservation groups. AAP/Greenpeace
Today’s announcement of a network of marine parks for Australia is a big step forward in marine conservation. However, major threats to one iconic marine area, the Great Barrier Reef, are land-based – mining, coastal development, and agricultural run-off. The marine park network will do nothing to diminish these threats.
UNESCO will soon release a detailed assessment of the Great Barrier Reef, which they warn could be downgraded to a World Heritage Site in Danger in the next year. If the in-Danger listing happens, it would be deeply embarrassing to the Queensland and Commonwealth governments, and the worldwide publicity would be an enormous blow to the Australian tourism industry. The comprehensive report expands on a summary released earlier this month, which has triggered a political storm between the Queensland State and Commonwealth governments.
The Great Barrier Reef is slowly declining, an inconvenient truth that is often ignored or denied. In the past 50 years, it has lost half of its coral cover. Many coastal reefs and seagrass meadows have been smothered by runoff of sediments from land, and the numbers of turtles, sharks and dugongs today are a small fraction of a few decades ago. Coral bleaching due to global warming has occurred twice throughout most of the length of the Barrier Reef, in 1998 and 2002.
The Conversation
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