Are Australians Really Prepared To Let The Great Barrier Reef Die?

Fairfax - Geoff Cousins*

All over the world the Great Barrier Reef is making front page news. The world is watching how Australia exercises its duty of care over this most loved international icon.
'As warming seas kill off one of the world's natural wonders, researchers are calling for urgent action,' Britons read in The Guardian newspaper this week. 'Last chance to save Great Barrier Reef, warn scientists', the headline read.

Sir David Attenborough back at the Great Barrier Reef.  Photo: Atlantic Productions



Inside, a double-page spread with large colour photos was headed, 'Bare bones: how climate change is bleaching the world's reefs to death'.
The BBC has also been covering the damage to the reef by coral bleaching, a direct result of warmer than usual water. 'About 35 per cent of corals in the northern and central parts of Australia's Great Barrier Reef have been destroyed by bleaching,' the UK's most trusted news service reported.
In the USA, agenda-setting media outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times ran similarly bold and urgent news pieces.
People around the world are worried about the reef, which is in Australia's care.
Australia's national daily also put the reef on the front page, but it had a very different take on the situation. 'Scientists 'exaggerated' coral bleaching' the headline read. The claim was that some 'activist scientists' and 'lobby groups' had confused people with references to percentages of coral death in different parts of the reef to make out the bleaching was worse than it really is.
Yet immediately following this coverage, top coral scientists were quick to point out that they had no need – or desire – to exaggerate the sad state of the reef.
'Twenty two per cent of whole GBR, 35 per cent north of Townsville. Different areas. Where's the exaggeration?' asked University of Queensland coral scientist Dr Selina Ward in a tweet.
'An inconvenient truth – shocking numbers speak for themselves. You decide how serious this is.' tweeted Professor Terry Hughes.
Clearly the reef is in serious trouble. Sir David Attenborough echoed many other mainstream voices in articulating the cause of the problem. 'The twin perils brought by climate change – an increase in the temperature of the ocean and in its acidity – threaten (the reef's) very existence,' he said.
The reef has become a major election issue in the minds of voters. Australians are entitled to ask what the political parties are offering to do about this problem.
The Coalition has pledged $171 million over six years, mostly to tackle run-off to the reef and improve water quality, as well as $6 million to combat the invasive crown-of-thorns starfish. Labor has promised $377 million of new investment for reducing water pollution, supporting research, and improving reef management as part of a $500 million fund over five years. The Greens' reef plan is for an extra $500 million over five years, plus a $1.2 billion loan fund to improve the health of the reef.
But, of course, the biggest threat to the reef is not run-off or crown-of-thorns – serious as these problems are – it's climate change.
This year's mass bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef is about as stark a reminder as we could possibly expect that climate change is hitting Australia hard, and we must act fast to get ourselves out of the coal business.
That means phasing out coal-fired power stations, replacing that capacity with clean energy, helping affected communities with the transition, and definitely not approving any new coal mines.
Yet saying goodbye to coal is glaring solution that the major parties still baulk at.
Proposals like Adani's enormous Carmichael mine, slated for the Galilee Basin in central Queensland, are completely unacceptable.
If it goes ahead, the Carmichael mine would be the largest coal mine in Australia. At peak capacity, the coal from this mine is expected to add more than 120 million tonnes of pollution a year to the world's climate problem. That's considerably more climate pollution than the entire country of New Zealand produces annually.
It would entrench coal burning for many decades to come, would worsen climate change and damage the Great Barrier Reef. That's why the Australian Conservation Foundation is challenging Environment Minister Greg Hunt's approval of the Carmichael mine in the federal court.
In our case, we are arguing that the Minister's approval of the massive coal mine is inconsistent with Australia's international obligations to protect the Great Barrier Reef, which is a World Heritage site, protected by UN convention.
I don't believe Australians will let the Great Barrier Reef die. But it will take more than just hopes and goodwill to save it.
We will need to convince our politicians that it is time to say no to proposals like Adani's Carmichael proposal and create a future that is coal free.
We need to ask ourselves: are we as a nation so in thrall to the coal industry that we are willing to let the reef perish?

Geoff Cousins in the president of the Australian Conservation Foundation

Links

• The Great Barrier Reef is losing its adjective and it's our fault
• The Great Barrier Reef report the government can't hide from the media
• Great Barrier Reef crisis: Time to address coral catastrophe
• 'Huge wake up call': Third of central, northern Great Barrier Reef corals dead

Nature's Called Our Bluff And We Can't Keep Ignoring It

Fairfax - Elizabeth Farrelly


Collaroy braces for another king tide. Storm affected residents have been evacuated ahead of another damaging high tide predicted to hit 10pm Tuesday night. Vision Courtesy: Network Ten

Two images haunt me from the storm – a busted pool on a busted beach, a boy leaping into broiling waves. They tell me I don't get Australia. I love it, but do not understand it. Do you, honestly?
We're small creatures on a dangerous continent in increasingly dangerous times. Yet we act like we have totally got this. Like we can build in incendiary bush, unguarded flood plains and active beach-zones and everything'll be just fine, like yesterday and the day before. We think nature's a toy and we're the big kids in the sandpit now, making the rules.

Illustration: Glen Le Lievre

I mean come on. Join a few dots here. Last month atmospheric CO₂ passed the 400ppm point-of-no-return. It was autumn, but we were still in the longest, hottest summer on record. Tasmania's world heritage forests burned for the first time in history and UNESCO reported the Great Barrier Reef is 93 per cent bleached, 50 per cent dead.
Then, right at summer's belated end, one of the strangest and most damaging coastal storms ever. Houses collapse, people die.
Yet our government heads into an election on a platform of cutting climate science by 30 per cent, blocking renewables investment and supporting one of the dirtiest roads in history. Que?
"We take it seriously," said Environment Minister Greg Hunt of the dying reef, even while his department secretly coerced UNESCO to redact the reef – and Australia – from its report. Black texta. Gone. Weeks earlier he'd approved, for a company that has trailed illegal pollution across India and Africa, a coalmine twice the size of Manhattan, yielding 120 million tonnes of dirty brown coal a year – a quarter of Australia's total output and 0.5 per cent of the world's carbon. Turnbull warns of more intense and frequent catastrophes but remains, famously, the PM without a climate plan.
It's as though they think not seeing the truth can save us from it. While the rest of the world demolishes motorways and vies for 100 per cent renewables, Barnaby Joyce chooses denial, Angus Taylor opposes the renewables target and a clique of Abbott-esque denialists has decimated renewables investment and blocked climate action at every opportunity.
This is nuts. Survival is not a left-wing issue. The Queen, the Pope and John Hewson all warn of climate change as economic catastrophe if not properly considered. And they don't mean embroidering better blindfolds.
The beachfront property owners at Collaroy and Narrabeen are a microcosm of this risk. Canaries, if you will. Of course, no storm can be attributed directly to climate change. Storms happen. But climate change made this one worse, in four different ways.
Climate change has already raised both sea levels and sea temperatures. Both factors exacerbated the size, momentum and damage of the storm surges. But climate change also heightens storm severity and, less familiar, changes the direction of approach.
Most storms on the eastern seaboard come from the southeast. This one, says UNSW coastal engineer associate professor Ian Turner, was east-north-east. That sounds trivial, but it's not. Catching the coastline "out of alignment," last week's east coast low found hitherto untested points of weakness, increasing the vulnerability of the beachfront and the houses upon it. "In my profession," says Turner, "we no longer debate climate change. We take it as given."
Turner notes the zone in which the Collaroy houses were built has long been regarded by coastal engineers as "active beach zone". Sure, the decision to build in these zones was made not by current owners but perhaps a century ago. But that makes it no less stupid. Active beach zone is like active volcano. Mostly it's fine, and then suddenly it's not. Shifting sands.
Of course there are things that can be done. In particular, there are seawalls, and there's beach nourishment. Seawalls usually protect what's behind them, but worsen damage further along the coastal drift-line, so should be undertaken strategically, nominating sacrificial beach areas that can tolerate erosion. That's tricky, since humans will mostly protect private property and send the erosion to land that cannot be developed – fragile wetlands or lagoons.
Trickier still is beach nourishment, which involves dredging sand from deeper water and replacing it onto beach and dunes so that, when storms come, that sand - rather than houses and roads - becomes the sacrifice. This has an obvious public benefit in creating more beach, but is temporary and – like seawalls - expensive.
Both cases beg the question, who should pay? And, given that climate change means such destruction will only get worse, can we justify any form of coastal development other than respectful retreat?
The government tries consistently to pretend these dots are not joined; that the biggest issues arising from both the 317 CSIRO job cuts and the ECL are those of personal loss. They're wrong.
The new NSW Coastal Reforms package (a month-old Act, a SEPP, a Coastal Council and an implementation manual) has been a 40-year project of emeritus professor and longtime coastal scientist Bruce Thom. He hopes it will replace ad hoc local coastal intervention with a clear, literal, littoral line in the sand.
But its work, which crucially involves monitoring and anticipating climate change effects on sea level, ocean temperature and storm behaviour (as well as biosphere-atmosphere carbon exchange, water-cycles and heat-wave behaviour), can only be inhibited by cutting the 75 CSIRO scientists whose jobs are precisely that, to say nothing of what happens to some of the world's most enduring data sets.
From the 1950s through to the 1980s, Australia led the world in atmospheric science. Even now, many of its scientists are revered as IPCC lead authors. Concern over this vandalism has been voiced by more than 2500 international scientists, plus the New York Times and the UN's Climate Research Program. And don't forget. Almost the entire east coast is potentially vulnerable to Collaroy-type damage. If the 75 scientists saved just 20 houses in 20 years, they'd have paid their salary.
Bruce Thom, and the Australian Coastal Society he founded, would like NSW's coastal reforms applied Australia-wide. But without the science to back it up, we're like that boy flinging himself into the Bondi cauldron. Brave to the point of hubris, confident to the point of death.

Links

'People just believe the risk doesn't exist'

How forecasters saw the storm coming

The Great Barrier Reef is losing its adjective and it's our fault

The Great Barrier Reef report the government can't hide from the media

Great Barrier Reef crisis: Time to address coral catastrophe

'Huge wake up call': Third of central, northern Great Barrier Reef corals dead

The Great Barrier Reef Is Losing Its Adjective And It's Our Fault

Fairfax - Tim Flannery*


Can we reverse coral bleaching? We head north to Queensland to see if anything can be done to save the Great Barrier Reef.

A few weeks ago I dived the Great Barrier Reef, near Port Douglas. It was one of the saddest days of my life. I am haunted by what I've seen. And infuriated. I had come with hope, for some recovery at least from the largest coral bleaching event on record. But what I found was worse than I could have imagined. The Great Barrier Reef is losing its adjective.
Most of the reef's usually vibrant staghorn and plate corals are covered with an ugly green slime. Even some of the massive stony corals – the hardiest of all – are scarred with the tell-tale white of bleaching. The reef's diverse and stunning fish population are starving.

Tim Flannery visited the Great Barrier Reef a few weeks ago. Photo: Supplied

A green turtle passes by. As the dead reef breaks down, its habitat will be eroded to rubble. And climate change is affecting the species in other ways. Rising seas have massively degraded its most important nesting site – Raine Island in the northern Great Barrier Reef. Those same rising waters caused, around 2011, the first mammal extinction brought about directly by climate change, when the entire habitat of the Bramble Key melomys (a native rodent unique to the Great Barrier Reef) was destroyed by saltwater intrusion.
As I reflected on my dive, I realised that I had been looking into the future. Because of el Nino, this year global temperatures rose by a third of a degree – to 1.2C above the pre-industrial average. By the 2030s, this year's conditions will be average.
This great organism, the size of Germany and arguably the most diverse place on earth, is dying before our eyes. Having watched my father dying two years ago, I know what the signs of slipping away are. This is death, which ever-rising temperatures will allow no recovery from. Unless we act now.

Three-quarters of the Barrier Reef is alive, says the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.

But when I turn on the television, you wouldn't know that our greatest national treasure is on the brink of disappearing. It's the same old claptrap about jobs and the economy, never mind the fact that it's always the same, and it never improves no matter who is elected.
Never mind the fact that a healthy environment underpins a thriving economy.
The Australian government successfully censored the reef from inclusion in an international scientific report on the impacts of climate change on World Heritage sites.
As if preventing Australians from knowing about what we've done is the same as actually doing something about it.
All other election issues will come and go but in this election is our last chance. The fate of the Great Barrier Reef is hanging in the balance.
The decisions made in the next four years will determine whether or not the reef lives or dies.
If global emissions aren't trending down by 2020, it will all but ensure the reef will disappear.
That's why this should be the reef election.
The election that puts us on the path to rapidly closing our old and polluting coal-fired power stations and helping the rest of the world do the same. It's a great opportunity for Australia to display real global political leadership, on an issue of supreme national importance.
Yet neither of the major parties have a coal closure plan. Environment Minister Greg Hunt has again approved the Carmichael coal mine, which would cancel out Australia's entire annual emissions reduction if it goes ahead. Both sides of politics fail to acknowledge the speed with which we must transition our energy systems if we are to ensure the long-term survival of the reef.
It is not too late to save the reef. But it will take courage and leadership to make the kinds of decisions necessary to do it.
The alternative will mean we'll be explaining to our grandchildren that we had the chance to save this natural wonder – but we were too selfish to take it.

*Tim Flannery is a former Australian of the Year, scientist and environmentalist and chief councillor at the Climate Council.

Links

• The Great Barrier Reef report the government can't hide from the media
• Great Barrier Reef crisis: Time to address coral catastrophe
• 'Huge wake up call': Third of central, northern Great Barrier Reef corals dead
• Nature's called our bluff and we can't keep ignoring it