The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
U.N. sounds alarm on Great Barrier Reef
Climate report paints dire picture of future of imperiled ecosystem.
— It was the silence of the sea that first rattled the teenage snorkeler, followed by a sense of horror as she saw the coral below had been drained of its kaleidoscopic color. This once-vibrant site on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef — a site she’d previously likened to a busy capital city — had become a ghost town, the victim of yet another mass bleaching event.
On that day in 2020, Ava Shearer got out of the water and cried. Today, with the release of a United Nations climate report that paints a dire picture of the Great Barrier Reef ’s future, the now-17-year-old marine science student and snorkeling guide wonders what will be left of the imperiled ecosystem by the time she finishes her degree at Australia’s James Cook University.
“I definitely worry about it,” says Shearer, who grew up along the World Heritage-listed natural wonder off Australia’s northeast coast. “I fear there might not be anything for me to study.”
There is much for the world to fear in today’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which bluntly states that the Great Barrier Reef is in crisis and suffering grave impacts from climate change, with frequent and severe coral bleaching caused by warming ocean temperatures. The worst bleaching event, in 2016, affected over 90% of the reef, and a punishing succession of bleaching incidents has left the northern and middle portion of the reef system in a “highly degraded state,” the report said.
The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on the planet — so large, in fact, that it is the only living thing on earth visible from space. It stretches over 1,400 miles and is home to more than 1,500 species of tropical fish, plus dolphins, whales, birds and even giant, century-old clams. Pre-pandemic, it contributed US$4.6 billion to the economy every year, largely thanks to tourism, and typically supports around 64,000 jobs.
That bleaching will continue along the reef is a virtual certainty, according to the IPCC. Perhaps even more ominously, the report suggests it may simply be too late to stop bleaching entirely. Even if the global community achieves its goal of limiting future warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, that still wouldn’t be sufficient to prevent more frequent mass bleaching events, though it may reduce their occurrence, the IPCC found.
The report predicts that ocean warming and marine heat waves will cause the loss and degradation of tropical shallow coral reefs, leading to “widespread destruction” of coral reef ecosystems. The report points to three previous mass bleaching events from 2016 to 2020 that caused significant coral loss, and warns that there has been “mass mortality” of some coral species.
For those who struggle to understand how devastating bleaching is, diver Tony Fontes likens it to a wildfire under the ocean. Fontes, who recently retired after 40 years as a diving instructor on the Great Barrier Reef, remembers diving on reefs that had recently been bleached and swimming through water that had turned milky-white from dead coral tissue. He would emerge covered in slime.
“You sit on the boat trying to wash it off and you just realize you’ve just swum across a reef that a couple weeks ago was full of life and vibrant, and now a bush fire has gone through it, and the coral is dead, and the rest of the marine life will just have to move on or die off,” he says.
Yet despite the looming threat in its own backyard, Australia has lagged behind other wealthy countries in its greenhouse gas emissions reduction performance and pledges. Last year, a climate think tank ranked Australia as the worst climate performer among comparable developed countries since nations pledged in the 2015 Paris climate agreement to limit global warming.
The issue is politically fraught in Australia, which is one of the world’s largest exporters of coal and liquefied natural gas, and one of the highest greenhouse gas emitters per capita.