While delegates from around the world meet at the UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid, scientists who are trying to preserve the world’s coral reefs have come together in Townsville.
Visiting from the United States is Jennifer Koss, the director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s coral reef conservation program.
“Unfortunately the threats to coral reefs are pretty similar worldwide,” she tells SBS News.
The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority downgraded the reef’s health from ‘poor’ to ‘very poor’ in its recent annual outlook.
US scientist Jennifer Koss says some US reefs are in even worse condition than the Great Barrier Reef. Source: SBS News
Ms Koss says parts of the US are in even worse condition than the Great Barrier Reef.
“We have a massive disease epidemic in Florida and now moving through the Caribbean,” she says.
Ms Koss says climate change is the elephant in the room and with US President Donald Trump pulling out of the Paris Agreement, it has placed her team in a difficult position.
“That would be a nice way of putting it,” she says.
“I work for the administration, so there’s only so much I could say, but I would say the folks that are here trying to do coral reef conservation, trying to balance that need to make economic gains and conservation gains at the same time, it’s a delicate balance and we have to figure it out.”
The meeting of the International Coral Reef Initiative in Townsville last week was an opportunity for local scientists working on the Great Barrier Reef to hear how their counterparts operate overseas.
Part of the Great Barrier Reef off Magnetic Island in Queensland last week. Source: SBS News
Local environmental physicist Dr Scott Heron says the more scientists learn about the reef, the more problems they seem to find.
While investing in science is helping, it’s not addressing the key problem of climate change.
“We’ve studied the recent history and we’ve seen a five-fold increase in the frequency of major disturbance events of coral bleaching in the past three decades,” Dr Heron says.
Both Dr Heron and Ms Koss also argue for the economic benefits of preserving coral reefs.
Australian environmental physicist Dr Scott Heron. Source: Rachel Cary/SBS News
“There’s about twice as many jobs that depend on a healthy barrier reef than depend upon mining,” Dr Heron says.
“Maybe there’s a choice there that societally we want to make.
“I have friends that work in the mining industries, it’s not that I want them to be out of work, I just want to be able to work out how we can shift working and I think renewable technologies is a way that that can be done,” he says.
Next year, UNESCO will decide whether to put the reef on its World Heritage in Danger list.
The federal and state governments don’t want that to happen. They submitted their case To UNESCO earlier this week.
Since the last report in 2015, there were mass coral bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, six tropical cyclones and an outbreak of crown-of-thorns starfish, which eat coral.
CEO of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Joshua Thomas, remains optimistic.
Arthur Bay on Queensland's Magnetic Island, just metres from the Great Barrier Reef. Source: Rachel Cary/SBS News
“The 2019 outlook report released by our authority does foresee the outlook for the reef remains very poor, but there is a window of opportunity in which we can take stronger action and improve the outlook for the Great Barrier Reef,” he says.
The authority says federal and state governments have invested 2.7 billion dollars over a decade, trying to save the reef.
But Dr Heron says without stopping climate change, there’s only so much science can achieve.
