When she was alive, Judith Wright often waxed poetic about the Great Barrier Reef.
“On a still blue summer day, with the ultramarine sea scarcely splashing the edge of the fringing reef, I was bending over a single small pool among the corals,” the Australian poet and activist wrote in her 1977 book, The Coral Battleground. “Above it dozens of small clams spread their velvety lips, patterned in blues and fawns, violets, reds, and chocolate browns, not one of them like another.”
Nearly 40 years later, the Great Barrier Reef boasts similar, colorful traits. The largest coral system in the world, it maintains a diverse population of 650 coral species, 1,625 types of fish, 143 varieties of sharks and rays, and more than 30 kinds of whales and dolphins. The reef also supports humans, its sheer beauty having generated $5.6 billion for the Australian economy and 69,000 full time jobs, according to Australian government figures.
But there’s something else that remains the same 40 years after the publication of Wright’s book: an imminent environmental threat to the reef, caused primarily by human activity. Right now, ocean acidification driven by human-caused carbon emissions is making it harder for corals and shells to grow, putting them at risk of dissolving. A rapidly warming ocean — also fueled by human-caused carbon emissions — is also threatening corals. A study published this past January showed that with average warming of only 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, the Great Barrier Reef could lose 90 percent of its coral cover. There are also a number of other threats, including poor water quality due in part to increased agricultural run-off.
Fortunately, the Australian government is trying to do something about it. On Saturday, Australia Prime Minister Tony Abbott unveiled a 35-year plan he said would protect the Great Barrier Reef from being put on the United Nations’ list of endangered World Heritage sites.
[We] are utterly committed as an entire nation to the protection of the Great Barrier Reef,” Abbott told reporters this weekend in Queensland. “The last thing I want to do as prime minister is anything that would compromise the quality of this reef which it is our duty to protect for the future.”
The plan includes some objectively big moves. For one, it completely bans the dumping of dredged waste, which has been damaging, smothering, and destroying coral reefs. That’s been happening because Australia has been expanding its coastal ship ports, which means dredging a huge amount of sea bed. A good deal of that dredge waste has been dumped into the reef’s waters, according to the World Wildlife Foundation.
In addition, the plan allocates AUS $100 million (U.S. $77.7 million) in federal government money over five years towards water quality initiatives, scientific research, and better environmental practices for the fishing industry. It also acknowledges that climate change is “the biggest threat to coral reefs the world over” — a huge admission considering Abbott once described climate science as “crap,” and recently repealed the country’s successful carbon tax.
For the most part, however, environmentalists are calling foul on Abbott’s admission that climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef. Mainly because, despite that admission, there really isn’t much in the plan that addresses the threat.
“This plan allows for massive coal port expansions and barely deals with climate change, despite the Australian government’s own scientists saying climate change is the number one threat to the Reef,” Greenpeace campaigner Jessica Panegyres said in a statement.
Indeed, though the plan says climate change must be dealt with to ensure the Great Barrier Reef’s future success, the plan does not address ongoing coal port and coal mining expansions in the country, which stand to sharply increase carbon emissions, which cause climate change. Right now, for example, there are nine proposed coal mines in Queensland’s Galilee Basin which, if built, would emit an estimated 705 million tons of carbon dioxide every year at capacity. According to the Guardian, that would make the Galilee Basin the seventh largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world when compared to other countries.
Australia’s Queensland state also recently reached a deal to expand a coal port near the Reef, which scientists have warned could permanently damage the reef.
This kind of back-and-forth on climate change has come to be expected from Abbott’s administration. Last summer after a meeting with President Barack Obama, Abbott told reporters that he is taking climate change “very seriously.” At the same time, however, Abbott has dismantled what had at one point been an ambitious climate change framework in Australia — he shut down the country’s climate research arm; he scrapped the country’s carbon pricing system; and he abandoned the country’s emissions reductions targets.
The poet Wright seems to have known this dynamic all too well. Chronicling her time as an activist in the 1970’s fighting for the preservation of the reef, she noted the difficulty of getting responsible governments to take every available and necessary step to protect it. That difficulty led her to the conclusion that the government’s success in protecting the reef would mean more than just the future of Australia’s national treasure — it would likely indicate the environmental success of the planet as a whole.
“The Reef’s fate is a microcosm of the new battle within ourselves,” she wrote. “So this is not just a story of one campaign. The human attitudes, the social and industrial forces, and the people who in one way or other take their part in the campaign, represent a much wider field, and one in which the future of the human race may finally be decided.”