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The latest Outlook report for the Great Barrier Reef records climate change as the reef’s principal threat but was finalised before it could record the latest mass-bleaching event. By Mike Seccombe.
Reef bleaching outpaces Outlook report
The Great Barrier Reef is now dying faster than scientists can document.
That was the first sentence of a story I wrote seven years ago. Sadly, the words are truer now than they were then.
When I previously wrote them, it was as the lead-in to an anecdote about the work of a team of scientists from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, which had documented the alarming details of the mass-bleaching of the northern section of the reef in 2016.
More than two thirds of the coral on one 300-kilometre-long section of the reef was dead. On the worst-affected reefs, mortality was as high as 99 per cent. More than a quarter of corals along another 600 kilometres of reef died in that bleaching event.
Before the findings were even published, however, the article’s lead author had begun a new survey of damage to the reef in the next bleaching.
“We can’t actually publish our research fast enough,” Professor Terry Hughes said at the time, “before we’re out again measuring the next bleaching event.”
Seven years later, following the release of the five-yearly Great Barrier Reef Outlook Report, it’s the same story. By the time it was released this month, there had been another bleaching.
“Déjà vu,” says Hughes.
The fourth in the series of comprehensive reports on the reef’s health and future, collated by its management agency, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, it covers the period from January 2019 to December 2023.
As such, it does not record the most recent, most extensive damage to the reef. Where previous mass bleachings mostly affected the northern two thirds of the World Heritage-listed reef, this one affected the southern reefs, too.
“The data are still coming in, but we know a lot more than has been put out in the public domain,” Hughes says. “We know from the satellite data that the heat stress in 2024 was more extreme, more widespread than any of the previous bleaching events.
“Individual scientists have been reporting heavy losses of corals all along the reef since February, March. I’m reviewing papers for journals, so that process of getting the data out is happening…
“Things are now happening so fast that a five-year moving window is too broad and the time lag is too long … in a reef that’s hit every year or every other year by these bleaching events.”
Hughes’s sense of déjà vu relates not just to the fact that the science is struggling to keep up with the rolling catastrophe on the reef but to the presentation of the evidence in the latest Outlook report.
He says the “primary conclusion” of the latest 600-page review of the scientific literature is the same as all the previous Outlook reports, back to 2009: that climate change is the No. 1 destroyer of corals, with coastal run-off a very distant No. 2, and other factors such as coastal development less significant still.
“And there’s always an argument put in the Outlook reports, that although the trajectory is bad and the outlook is worse, the Barrier Reef is resilient, and its World Heritage outstanding ‘universal values’ are somehow intact. That last bit stretches the imagination.”
What the Outlook reports do not do, Hughes says, is look at the cumulative impact of all the mass bleachings – in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022 and now 2024 – and how much of the reef is left undamaged by one or more bleaching events.
“After the 2022 event, only 2 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef had escaped bleaching ... and only 20 per cent had escaped severe bleaching. Those numbers would have gone down because of 2024…”
In Hughes’s opinion, the Outlook report has become not just a scientific exercise but increasingly a political one.
“It has taken on a new function, which is to convince UNESCO that everything isn’t too bad. It’s now part of Australia’s formal reporting to UNESCO, and it didn’t have that function early on.”
UNESCO is the United Nations body responsible for determining and monitoring World Heritage sites. The Great Barrier Reef was the first reef in the world to be inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1981.
Australia has long been concerned that the reef might be declared “in danger”, which would threaten the annual $5.2 billion generated by tourism, and consequently 64,000 jobs.
UNESCO has questioned Australia’s stewardship of the reef at least as far back as 2011, when it expressed “extreme concern” about the decision to base three giant liquefied natural gas facilities on Curtis Island, within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.
Other issues of concern include run-off of silt, fertilisers and pesticides from land clearing and agriculture in the reef catchment, development of ports and the dumping of dredge spoil, loss of coastal habitats from other development, impacts from fishing and, of course, Australia’s slow progress in reducing greenhouse emissions.
Warnings that the reef could be declared in danger have been issued regularly since 2012.
In response to the criticism, in 2015 the federal and Queensland governments came up with Reef 2050, a long-term management plan that included commitments to improving water quality, limiting tree clearing, limiting port development and stopping dumping.
Progress has been slow. Richard Leck, head of oceans at WWF-Australia, points to the 140,000 hectares of land clearing the Queensland government acknowledges in reef catchments every year. He notes the government is a long way from achieving its water-quality target.
Australia has skated the edge of an “in danger” listing for the reef for a long time, and continues to do so. The country narrowly avoided it in 2021, after then environment minister Sussan Ley embarked on a round of lobbying of the 21 national representatives of the World Heritage Committee.
It was widely reported that the Morrison government engaged in a vote-swapping exercise whereby Australia took positions in favour of other countries against UNESCO’s advice, and they did the same in return.
Most recently, in June, Australia was again warned that the reef could be placed on a list of sites “in danger” if it failed to meet a number of agreed measures arising out of a report by a Reactive Monitoring Mission comprising agents from UNESCO and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The government is to submit a progress report by February 2025, after which the committee “could consider the inclusion of the property on the list of World Heritage in Danger” at its 2026 meeting.
To its credit, the Albanese government has done much more than its predecessor in attempting to satisfy UNESCO’s concerns about the stewardship of the reef. In a statement last September, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek welcomed the decision by the World Heritage Committee to not include the Great Barrier Reef on the List of World Heritage in Danger.
She ticked off a suite of actions by the government to protect the reef, including $200 million to improve water quality through revegetation, grazing-management works to limit erosion, the rejection of a coalmine proposed by Clive Palmer adjacent to the reef, the withdrawal of funding for several proposed dams, the allocation of an extra $163 million in funding for reef science, and a commitment to setting up a new environmental protection agency.
Still, the government’s climate targets are not sufficient to meet the recommendations set out by UNESCO.
The recommendations of the Reactive Monitoring Mission said a plan to save the reef “should include clear government commitments to reduce greenhouse emissions consistent with the efforts required to limit the global average temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Commitments should harness the state party’s significant capabilities to take accelerated action…”
That, says Lesley Hughes, a Climate Council director, cuts to the heart of the matter.
It’s not that the other measures like reducing run-off are not important, but global heating is the “elephant in the room”.
“Those other measures hopefully make it a little bit more resilient. But really, it’s the heat of the water.”
From January to March this year, reef waters were the hottest they had been in more than 400 years, and 1.73 degrees hotter than the average for the years before 1900, according to an article this month in Nature.
One of the scientists who co-wrote the report, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, professor of marine studies at the University of Queensland, despairs at the lack of action.
“Every year it’s a little bit hotter, which means that there’s going to be less and less coral over time, until maybe five or 10 years from now the Great Barrier Reef won’t be made of living corals.”
The reef will still be there, “but it’ll be, you know, algae and cyanobacteria and other things that are prospering”.
It has already happened elsewhere. Some former coral reefs in the Caribbean are now algal-dominated ecosystems.
Hoegh-Guldberg is tired of delivering the same depressing message about the need to stop burning fossil fuels.
“I feel like the town haranguer,” he says. “We should have, 20 years ago, heeded the science message and begun to solve it. Because now we’re losing the Great Barrier Reef and the Amazon and all these different ecosystems. That should be enough to make us say, ‘Right, we no longer use fossil fuels. It’s dangerous from every point of view.’ ”
Instead, the government continues to approve new fossil fuel projects. Ships laden with coal and gas keep setting sail from Queensland ports, threading their way through the reef their cargoes are killing.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 31, 2024 as "Come to reef".
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