A Barrier Reef Anemonefish (Amphiprion akindynos) in host anemone. Pixie Garden, Ribbon Reefs, Great Barrier Reef. Credit: Richard Ling/cc by 2.0

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Aug 21 2014 (IPS)

Increased effort is needed to protect Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef, which is in serious decline and will likely deteriorate further in the future, according to a new report.

“Greater reductions of all threats at all levels, reef-wide, regional and local, are required to prevent the projected declines,”said an outlook report by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, the government agency responsible for protecting the reef.“A thriving commercial fishery is gone, so are the dolphins and dugongs.” -- Richard Leck of WWF-Australia

However, the same agency recently approved the dumping of five million tonnes of dredging spoil in the reef region. Scientists and coral reef experts universally condemned the decision.

Documents obtained by Australia’s ABC TV investigative programme this week revealed scientists inside the Park Authority also opposed the dumping inside the UNESCO World Heritage Area.

“That decision has to be a political decision. It is not supported by science at all, and I was absolutely flabbergasted when I heard,”Charlie Veron, a renowned coral reef scientist, told ABC. Veron is the former chief scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

The Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is one of the seven greatest natural wonders of the world. Visible from space, it is a startlingly beautiful mosaic made up of thousands of reefs, sea grass beds, and islands running 2,300 km along the coast of the state of Queensland.

The GBR from above. Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

In 1981 UNESCO declared the GBR a World Heritage Area, calling it “an irreplaceable source of life and inspiration”. It was home to 10 percent of all fish on the planet. Dugongs and many varieties of dolphins and sea turtles were once abundant.

Although protected as a marine park for decades, more than half of the coral is dead.Without concerted action, just five to 10 percent of the coral will remain by 2020, according to a 2012 scientific survey reported by IPS.

“I’ve worked on the reef for over a decade and those survey results were absolutely stunning,”said Richard Leck, spokesperson for WWF-Australia.

“The GBR is likely the best monitored reef in the world and we’re seeing the impacts of massive coastal development,”Leck told IPS.

In 2010, the Australian government approved four massive liquid natural gas (LNG) processing plants with port facilities at the coal port of Gladstone in central Queensland. Extensive dredging resulted in the dumping of 46 million tonnes of material in the harbour and inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park boundaries.

Much of the most toxic dredging material was to be contained inside a huge retaining or bund wall in the Gladstone Harbour. It soon began to fail, eventually leaking as much as 4,000 tonnes of material daily. The impacts have been devastating.

“A thriving commercial fishery is gone, so are the dolphins and dugongs,”said Leck. “Gladstone was a clear failure by state and national governments.”

Local tourist operators say the water quality and clarity has declined significantly.

Queensland is also a major mining and export region, shipping 156 million tonnes annually, mostly to Asian markets. Now there are proposals to expand that output sixfold to nearly one billion tonnes annually by 2020.

India’s Adani Group plans to spend six billion dollars to build Queensland’s biggest coal mine, including a new town and a 350 km railway to connect to Port Abbot, near the tourist town of Bowen.

Other Indian miners, along with a number of Chinese mining interests, have locked up an estimated 20 billion tonnes of coal resources in central Queensland. Australian mining companies,including mining billionaire Gina Rinehart’s Hancock Prospecting, are also expanding their operations.

In December 2013, Australia’s Minister of Environment Greg Hunt approved a plan to create one of the world’s largest coal ports at Port Abbot. A few months later, and in spite of strong opposition from its own scientists, the Park Authority agreed to allow five million tonnes of dredged material from Port Abbot to be dumped in the GBR.

“The Park Authority was in a difficult position. Saying ‘no’meant rejecting the minister’s approval of the dredging,”said Leck.

Hunt told ABC TV that he’d conducted “a very careful and deep review”and concluded that “the unequivocal advice we received was: this can be done safely.”

There is substantial scientific literature showing sediment from dredging can smother and kill marine species. Sediment also reduces light levels, causes physiological stress, impairs growth and reproduction, clogs the gills of fish, and promotes diseases, said Terry Hughes, director of the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland.

Some dredge spoil is very fine sediment — tiny little particles suspended in the water column — readily dispersed by winds, currents and waves. Over a period of just a few months they can travel 100 kilometres or more, Hughes told IPS.

A recently published modelling study predicts that fine sediments in suspension can spread up to 200 kilometres from coal ports within 90 days. It also measured sediments found in coral reefs in the GBR near another coal port and found high levels of chemicals called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) which are associated with coal dust.

Given the perilous health of the reef, which is also facing enormous threats from rising water temperatures and ocean acidity due to CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, Hughes and other scientists are calling for a complete ban on dumping in the GBR or anywhere near it.

The additional threat posed by coal ports and other industrial developments along the coast is so serious that UNESCO warned Australia it would change the reef’s prestigious World Heritage Site designation to a “World Heritage Site in Danger”.

The UNESCO decision is expected mid-2015, which is also when the Port Abbot dredging is scheduled to begin.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The Great Barrier Reef is home to over 1,500 species of fish. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Neena Bhandari
SYDNEY, May 14 2013 (IPS)

Mining and port development coupled with decreasing water quality along Australia’s north-eastern coast are threatening the continent’s World Heritage-listed tourist drawcard, the Great Barrier Reef.

An assessment report of the reef by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has said the lack of “firm and demonstrable commitment” by either the Australian federal or the Queensland state government to limit port developments near the reef “represents a potential danger to the outstanding universal value of the property.”

Spread across an area of 348,000 square kilometres, the Great Barrier Reef includes about 2,500 individual reefs and over 900 islands and is home to breeding colonies of seabirds and marine turtles, snubfin dolphins and the humpback whale.

“Will we sacrifice the Great Barrier Reef and accept dangerous climate change as the inevitable cost of propping up just one industry?” - Greenpeace Senior Campaigner Dr. Georgina Woods
Australia’s resources boom, combined with increasing demand for coal in Asian markets, is attracting billions of dollars worth of investments in mining projects here. About 43 industrial development proposals are under assessment for their potential impact on the world’s most extensive coral reef ecosystem.

“With a number of major development (projects) coming up for approval in the coming weeks and months, the Australian government is playing a risky game if it continues to approve them because it may force the World Heritage committee to place the reef on their list of shame,” World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Spokesman Richard Leck told IPS.

Since 2011, UNESCO and the IUCN have expressed serious concerns about the management of the world heritage area.

“Australia has clearly ignored the recommendations. The federal government continues to approve new developments with no long-term commitment to restricting industrialisation to the existing footprint. The Queensland government has also weakened some of the laws that protect the reef from development and land clearing,” Leck told IPS.

WWF estimates that the clearing of tens of thousands of hectares of vegetation along rivers leading to the reef, and allowing dredge spoil to be dumped in coastal waters will have a significant impact on the protected site, which contains 400 types of coral, 1,500 species of fish, 4,000 types of mollusc, about 240 species of birds, and several sponges, anemones, marine worms and crustaceans.

The reef waters also provide major feeding grounds for threatened species, and hosts one of the world’s largest populations of the dugong.

According to Australian Marine Conservation Society’s Great Barrier Reef Campaign Director Felicity Wishart, “The development of port infrastructure and increased shipping movements require the dredging of millions of tonnes of seabed, often seagrass meadows which are the breeding and feeding areas for turtles, dugongs and other marine life.

“The sediments stirred up during dredging can travel tens of kilometres away, settling on coral ecosystems and plant life. This can damage or destroy vital wetlands, fish breeding grounds and other coastal habitats,” Wishart told IPS.

Moreover, environmentalists are concerned that increased shipping will aggravate the risk of oil spills in the reef. About 4,000 ships plow the Great Barrier Reef annually and this number is expected to grow to 6,000 ships by 2020.

To protect the healthiest and most pristine section of the reef from terrestrial threats, especially new ports and mining development, The Wilderness Society is seeking a World Heritage nomination for the Cape York Peninsula, located on the northern tip of Queensland.

“This would rule out the Balkanu Corporation’s Wongai coalmine proposal, which would open up new areas to development, and Rio Tinto’s South of Embley bauxite mine, which would require 900 shipping movements through the reef between the Weipa mine and the processing facility at Gladstone,” Gavan McFadzean, Wilderness Society’s northern Australia campaigner, told IPS.

According to projections by the Bureau of Resource and Energy Economics, coal exports from Australia, already the world’s leading exporter, will roughly double in a little over a decade. Over the past 10 years black coal exports have increased by more than 50 percent. Major Asian economies like Japan, China, the Republic of Korea, India and Taiwan account for 88 percent of all black coal exports.

Greenpeace Senior Campaigner Dr. Georgina Woods summed up the situation with a simple question: “Will we sacrifice the Great Barrier Reef and accept dangerous climate change as the inevitable cost of propping up just one industry?”

Research commissioned by Greenpeace estimates Australia’s coal export expansion is the second biggest of 14 proposed fossil fuel enterprises that will push the world beyond agreed global warming limits. Coral reefs around the world are unlikely to survive if global temperatures increase by 1.5 degrees. “Right now, we’re heading decisively for four degrees of warming,” Woods told IPS.

CEO of the Sydney-based Climate Institute, John Connor, warned that the Great Barrier Reef is under threat from climate change, both from ocean acidification and from increasingly severe storms, but said Australia had taken some important steps to reduce emissions by putting in place the necessary carbon laws.

“Australia’s carbon price mechanism regulates emissions by limiting them not just pricing them. It will reduce at least 12 million tonnes of carbon pollution a year and has the potential to reduce 1.1 billion tonnes by 2020,” Connor told IPS.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s Labour Government has also announced it will pour 27 million dollars into improving the quality of water flowing into the Great Barrier Reef lagoon. It will help reduce the run-off from farms causing coral bleaching and algae growth, which smothers seagrass beds and coral reefs.

Larissa Waters, senator for the Australian Greens, has introduced a bill in the Senate to adopt the World Heritage committee’s key recommendations and she is calling on both the Liberal and the Labour Party to support it.

“The government must stop putting the interests of big mining companies ahead of the reef and place a moratorium on all further developments until the joint government strategic assessment is finished in 2015 and also stop allowing new ports in pristine areas,” Waters told IPS.

Experts are worried about the economic impact of destruction to the reef, which contributes 822 million dollars a year to the national economy and supports about 60,000 jobs. Recent polling shows that 91 percent of Australians think protecting the reef is the most important environmental issue in 2013.

The common clownfish at home on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. More than 50 percent of the coral in the 2,300 km long reef has died over the past 27 years. Credit: Jan Derk/public domain

By Stephen Leahy
MONTEREY, California, U.S., Oct 1 2012 (IPS)

Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef is dying, and little will be left less than 10 years. More than half of the coral in the 2,300 km long reef has died over the past 27 years, according to a scientific survey released Monday.

Unless Australians act with urgency, only five to 10 percent of the 3,000 individual coral reefs off the eastern coast of Australia will remain, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“We are losing an entire ecosystem in the best-managed coral reef system in the world,” said Katharina Fabricius of the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), and study co-author.

“This is the first thorough analysis of all the survey data on the GBR (Great Barrier Reef),” Fabricius told IPS.

“I can’t believe it…that is really shocking,” said Graeme Kelleher, first chair and CEO of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which has protected and managed most of the reef since 1975.

“If the people at AIMS (Australian Institute of Marine Science) did it, then it must be real,” Kelleher said when IPS showed him an embargoed copy of the study.

There have been previous warnings that Australia was losing one of the world’s seven natural wonders — and its six-billion-dollar-a-year tourist attraction. This year UNESCO announced it might downgrade the reef’s prestigious designation as a World Heritage Site to a “World Heritage Site in Danger”.

Storms, crown of thorns starfish outbreaks and coral bleaching are responsible for decimating the world’s biggest coral reef, the AIMS study reports.

Powerful cyclones like Cyclone Yasi in 2011 have damaged the reef with powerful waves. A bigger impact, however, is the torrential rainfall on land that results in big floods that wash enormous amounts of fertilisers, pesticides, animal waste and sediments off the land onto the reef. That run-off affects the reef directly and also creates perfect conditions for outbreaks of coral-eating crown of thorns starfish.

“The recent drought-breaking floods have hit the reef hard,” said Fabricius.

Storms and subsequent runoff directly account for 48 percent of the coral deaths. Crown of thorns starfish are responsible for 42 percent, with bleaching from too warm waters accounting for 10 percent, according the intensive survey of 214 of the 3,000 reefs in the GBR. Only three of the reefs surveyed were unaffected.

“A single crown of thorns starfish can lay 60 million eggs and their larvae thrive on the plankton blooms that result from high levels of nutrients coming off the land,” said Fabricius.

Those nutrients are largely from agricultural sources – sugar cane and grazing mainly, she said. Most of the GBR is found off the coast of the state of Queensland, which is Australia’s largest agricultural region.

Crown of thorns starfish are a native species whose numbers have exploded over the last 20 years. There is no known way to effectively control them. Divers do go into the water and kill them individually but it is impossible to keep up.

The only solution is watershed management specifically targeted to reducing nutrient levels offshore, said Fabricius.

“We can’t stop the storms but, perhaps we can stop the starfish. If we can, then the reef will have more opportunity to adapt to the challenges of rising sea temperatures and ocean acidification,” said John Gunn, CEO of AIMS.

The AIMS research likely will be attacked in Australia even though it is based on the most comprehensive reef monitoring programme in the world.

“Our researchers have spent more than 2,700 days at sea and we’ve invested in the order of 50 million dollars in this monitoring programme,” said Peter Doherty, research fellow at AIMS.

Newly-elected Queensland Premier Campbell Newman has ignored UNESCO’s concerns about the GBR and his government, including the minister of the environment, have expressed doubt that humans are influencing climate change.

IPS previously reported that the Newman government intends to aggressively expand coal mining and the export industry and has approved extensive dredging for coal port expansion and new coal ports. Right now some 1,700 bulk freighters carrying coal navigate through or around the Great Barrier Reef, and that number will jump to 10,000 in 2020 by some estimates.

There already have been accidents. In 2010, the coal ship “Shen Neng” took a short cut and ran aground on the reef, leaving a three km scar, an oil spill and trail of toxins from its anti-fouling paint.

Giant liquified natural gas (LNG) tankers are also coming to the GBR. Queensland has approved hundreds of drilling sites, including hydraulic fracking operations to tap the extensive deposits of coal-seam gas (also known as coal-bed methane).

In central Queensland four LNG processing plants with port facilities have been proposed. Extensive dredging is already underway in the port of Gladstone and Australia’s minister of the environment has approved the ocean dumping of millions of tonnes of dredged material inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park boundaries.

The GBR can recover if it is properly protected but recovery will take 10 to 20 years, said Hugh Sweatman, a co-author of the AIMS study.

Whether the reef gets the breathing space it needs to recover from multiple assaults and be protected from future impacts is entirely up to Australians.

The world’s largest and best protected coral reef will be doomed by Australia’s unprecedented scale of planned coal and gas development, experts say.

The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest reef system, with 3,000 reefs running 2,300 km along most of the state of Queensland’s coast. Credit: Nickj/CC BY 3.0

This threat to the Great Barrier Reef is so serious that UNESCO recently announced it may downgrade the reef’s prestigious designation as a World Heritage Site to a “World Heritage Site in Danger”.

“That would be a big blow to our tourism industry, which generates nearly six billion dollars a year and employs over 50,000 people,” said Terry Hughes, director of the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Australia on the last day of the 12th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS) here in Cairns, Australia.

“It’s immoral to keep building new coal mines when we know so much about climate change and its impacts,” Hughes told IPS.

Newly-elected Queensland Premier Campbell Newman responded to the UNESCO announcement by reportedly saying, “We are in the coal business. If you want decent hospitals, schools and police on the beat, we all need to understand that.”

Both the state and federal government collect substantial royalties from the mining sector.

The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest reef system, with 3,000 reefs running 2,300 km along most of the state of Queensland’s coast. Although protected as a marine park for decades, coral cover has declined 50 percent since 1960s due to impacts from land-based pollution including fertiliser and mine runoff, bleaching from warmer waters and outbreaks of crown of thorns starfish that eats coral.

Australia is the world’s biggest coal exporter and Queensland is a major mining and export region, shipping 156 million tonnes annually, mostly to Asian markets. Now there are proposals to expand that output sixfold to nearly one billion tonnes annually by 2020.

That enormous amount is equivalent to the collective heft of nearly every motor vehicle on the planet – some 800 to 900 million vehicles in all.

The carbon footprint from that much coal means another 1.8 billion tonnes of climate-damaging carbon dioxide (CO2) would be added to the atmosphere annually. The world’s best scientists say reductions in emissions of the billions of tonnes of CO2 are needed before 2020 to prevent catastrophic climate change.

Climate change has already warmed the oceans 0.5C degrees and made them 25 to 30 percent more acidic, impacting the health of reefs around the world. That will only worsen with every tonne of coal burned.

All of those tonnes of coal dug from the Queensland outback are loaded on huge coal ships that have to navigate through or around the Great Barrier Reef.

India’s Adani Group recently announced it will spend six billion dollars to build Queensland’s biggest coal mine in the state’s central region, including a new town and a runway for fly-in, fly-out workers. It will also build a 350 km railway to connect to new port facilities on the coast to ship some 60 million tonnes a year back to India.

Other Indian miners, along with a number of Chinese mining interests, have locked up an estimated 20 billion tonnes of coal resources in central Queensland. Australian mining companies are also expanding their operations.

Existing coal ports will need major expansions and new ports have been proposed up and down the Queensland coast. The number of coal ships needed to move all that coal is projected to jump from the present 1,700 to more than 10,000 by 2020.

In 2010, the coal ship “Shen Neng” took a short cut and ran aground on the reef, leaving a three-km scar, an oil spill and trail of toxins from its anti-fouling paint. Clean-up costs for such accidents could top 100 million dollars and it would be difficult to get shipping companies registered in foreign countries to pay the costs, officials told IPS.

Coal may be king in Queensland, but liquefied natural gas (LNG) is the big new player. In fact, Australia is home to more than 70 percent of LNG projects in the world.

Tens of billions of dollars are being invested in hundreds of drilling sites, including hydraulic fracturing operations to tap the extensive deposits of coal-seam gas (also known as coal-bed methane). Delivering the gas for exports means new pipelines and giant processing plants to turn the methane into LNG for shipping on special ships with high-pressure tanks to Japan, Korea and other Asian markets.

Gas also has a big carbon footprint. IPS reported earlier this year that U.S. scientific studies show that coal-seam gas can have higher CO2 emissions than coal when emissions from mining, transmission and burning is included.

Four LNG processing plants with port facilities have been proposed at the rapidly expanding coal port of Gladstone in central Queensland. Extensive dredging is already underway and Australia’s minister of the environment has approved the ocean dumping of millions of tonnes of dredged material inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park boundaries, Hughes said.

Even without the dumping, satellite images have shown dredging sediment, including toxic metals, drifting up to 35 kilometres out to sea. Mass fish kills have been recently been reported in the area and commercial fishers are blaming it on the dredging activity.

Duongs, sea turtles, dolphins and other marine species are not doing well south of Cook Town, where most of the coastal development has occurred so far, said Alana Grech, a researcher at James Cook University. New ports and industrial development would have a negative impact, especially if done in the relatively pristine north, Grech told IPS.

“We must protect the coastline and reef north of Cook Town. We can’t have new ports up and down the coast because it will further fragment the habitat,” she said. “We’re at a crossroads here. Some hard decisions will have to be made.”

The cumulative affects of development, pollution, shipping and climate change are very worrying, said Laurence McCook, science co-ordinator of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which has a mandate to manage and protect the reef. To date no cumulative impact assessment has ever been done. That was one of the main criticisms UNESCO made, McCook said.

Until now, the potential impacts of each LNG terminal, coal mine and port expansion proposal has been only examined in isolation without ever considering the cumulative impacts. Some of these have already received government approvals to proceed.

Australia is now doing a “strategic assessment” to determine the potential cumulative impacts of new and proposed development and comply with UNESCO’s request that this should be done before any new development. The assessment is expected to be completed by 2014.

“If we can’t protect the reefs here in Australia, who can protect reefs anywhere?” said McCourt.

View of Australia's Great Barrier Reef as seen from space. Credit: NASA/public domain

By Stephen Leahy
CAIRNS, Jul 9 2012 (IPS)

The planet’s richest region of coral and marine life, which feeds 130 million people, is in trouble.

More than 85 percent of the coral reefs in a huge triangular region encompassing Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and smaller Pacific islands are in decline or on the edge, according a new report.

Reefs in the six-million-square-kilometre “Coral Triangle” are incredibly important to coastal communities for food, livelihoods, and protection from waves during storms, said Lauretta Burke, senior associate at World Resources Institute and a lead author of the report released Monday at 12th International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS) in Cairns, Australia.

Coral reefs are often called the rainforests of the oceans for the richness of species they harbour, representing 25 to 30 percent of all marine species. More than 2,000 scientists from 80 countries are sharing their research here in Cairns at this global symposium that convenes every four years.

Overfishing, fishing reefs with explosives, land-based pollution and the live fish trade are the local threats to reefs and the thousands of species that live in the Coral Triangle, Burke told IPS at the symposium.

“Explosives are used on overfished reefs to scoop up the last remaining fish. Poison chemicals are widely used to stun fish so they can be captured for the aquarium and live fish markets,” she said.

But the main global threat to reefs is from the use of fossil fuels, which is both heating up the oceans and turning them more acidic, weakening corals and making them more vulnerable to disease and storms, she said.

“The benefits reefs provide are at risk, which is why concerted action to mitigate threats to reefs across the Coral Triangle region is so important.”

Although the Coral Triangle covers only 1.6 percent of the ocean, it contains nearly 30 percent of the world’s coral reefs and more than 3,000 species of fish – twice the number found anywhere else in the world. More than 130 million people living in the region rely on reef ecosystems for food, employment, and revenue from tourism, the report found.

Without concerted action to address the threats, more than 90 percent of reefs in the region will be decimated by 2050, the report concludes.

Some 16 percent of reefs in the Coral Triangle are in marine protected areas (MPAs) but the report estimates that less than one percent of MPAs are fully effective at reducing threats such as overfishing and destructive fishing. This is substantially lower than the global average of 28 percent.

Lack of resources devoted to managing MPAs and the remoteness of many reefs makes protection and enforcement very difficult, Burke said.

A global study of reefs in the rest of the world found that on average 60 percent are under threat. Even Australia’s famous Great Barrier Reef, which many consider the best protected reef system in the world, is in decline.

“In my lifetime I have seen reefs disappear before my eyes,” Terry Hughes, director of the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Australia.

Nearly all the corals in the Caribbean Sea where Hughes started his marine science career have been destroyed by pollution, overfishing, coral bleaching and disease. Coral bleaching occurs when seawater temperatures rise to 30 degrees C or more. Climate change has already increased ocean temperatures 0.7 C degrees on average.

“I came to Australia’s as a kind of Caribbean reef refugee to work on the Great Barrier Reef,” said Hughes, who is also the organiser of the coral reef symposium here.

The Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest reef system, with 3,000 reefs spanning 3,000 km along the east coast of Australia. Although protected as a marine park for decades, coral cover has declined 50 percent since 1960s due to human impacts from land-based pollution, bleaching and outbreaks of crown of thorns starfish that eats coral.

“Coral reefs are crucial for coastal societies and their economies,” Hughes told IPS. The Great Barrier Reef generates nearly six billion dollars in annual revenues from tourism and fishing.

Healthy reefs are more resilient to global threats like climate change, which places great importance on good local management, says Hughes.

In 2009, the six countries of the Coral Triangle launched a special initiative to promote sustainable fishing, improve MPA management, strengthen climate change adaptation, and protect threatened species in the region. This is a great initiative and the right response to the threats to reefs in the region, said Burke.

“Our hope is that leaders of the Coral Triangle Initiative will use the data in our report to take stronger actions to protect reefs,” she said.

The public also plays an important role in pushing policy makers to make the right decisions to protect interests of future generations. Public awareness about the importance of coral reefs is key.

“I’d like to see people ask where the fish they are eating comes from. And for tourists to only stay at hotels that have minimum impact on the environment,” Burke said.

“Reefs are resilient – they can recover from coral bleaching and other impacts,” she added.