Official: The Great Barrier Reef is not dead

Dr Russell Reichelt, the Chairman and CEO of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, has hit out at recent claims in the media that the Great Barrier Reef is dead.

These are irresponsible and untrue, says the noted authority on the GBR, although he does admit to being deeply concerned about the impacts of the mass coral bleaching event which is affecting coral reefs throughout the world.

As Dr Reichelt says, headlines that disempower people will not help us protect the Reef’s long-term future. And there is a lot of campaigning going on about The Reef regarding coal transportation, wider agendas about carbon and CO2,  even within academia fighting for funding at a time when that is drying up.

But the GBRMPA’s preliminary analysis of last summer’s coral bleaching event indicates its impact was highly variable across the Great Barrier Reef, with an overall coral mortality of 22 per cent.

The most severe bleaching occurred in the remote northern third of the Marine Park, which experienced the greatest heat stress, while most reefs south of Port Douglas-Cairns region escaped major impacts.

That said, our IFISH Apprentice price-winning trip with Nomad Sportfishing Adventures north of the Port Douglas to Tydeman Reef in late-January 2016 yielded an absolute plethora of fish amid stunning coral gardens that we all saw daily with our own eyes. Maybe they weren't quite bleached at that point.

The 2016 mass coral bleaching, the worst bleaching event to affect the Great Barrier Reef, was triggered by record-breaking sea surface temperatures — reflecting the underlying trend of global ocean warming caused by climate change combined with a strong El Niño.

The GBRMPA is back in the water with its management partners surveying the survivorship and recovery rates of coral following last summer’s bleaching event. The surveys are being conducted across the Reef over six weeks and will provide an up-to-date assessment of impacted coral.

Ensuring Reef resilience is our core priority and we are doing all we can to support its recovery, says Dr Reichelt, who began diving on the Great Barrier Reef in 1968 and has worked as a research scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science in the 1980s, studying the ecology of coral reefs, particularly the crown-of-thorns starfish.

He has a PhD in marine science and has served as CEO of the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Chairman of the Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, and as a member of Australia’s State of the Environment Committee.

Meantime, over the next decade, the Australian and Queensland governments will spend some $2 billion on Reef protection with the implementation of the Reef 2050 Plan to improve the health and resilience of the Great Barrier Reef continuing to be a national priority, with the Marine Park Authority playing a key role.

The national effort includes financing clean energy projects through the Reef Fund, improving water quality by reducing sediment and nutrient runoff into Reef waters through Reef Trust, controlling the coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish through investment in surveillance and control programs, as well as additional programs valued at some $460 million over eight years to protect the Reef.

The Reef is a very large and resilient ecosystem. While the bleaching this year was very serious, recent studies have shown that in the three years prior to the bleaching coral cover increased by 19 per cent across the Marine Park.

The Great Barrier Reef still remains in a much better state than many other coral reefs around the world; however, the severity of the global mass bleaching event reinforces the need for a concerted international effort on climate change as well as national and local actions to reduce all other pressures on the Reef.

"Our message should be one of empowerment — working together, we can make a difference," Dr Reichelt says in the face of a lot of alarmist headlines and academics pushing their own agendas and funding. More from the official source, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, at www.gbrmpa.gov.au.