The Great Barrier Reef
Foundation has had some good fortune that few environmental NGOs could count
on. The $444 million it was granted by the government earlier this year dwarfs
its previous budgets by a large multiple. Having worked in two small environmental
charities of a similar operating budget and staffing to the pre-windfall
foundation, I can confirm getting so much money without even applying for it is
far beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.
Still, the biggest
questions about the GBRF windfall don’t relate to its good luck in an opaque
government decision, or even its connections to the fossil fuel industry.
These
are entirely valid concerns, but they risk eclipsing the bigger significance of
the government’s move.
What we also need to ask
is: what does the foundation do? What are its outputs, its activities? And why
would the federal government be so keen to direct such a huge chunk of funding
to those activities?
At best, the
government’s massive funding dump is a long-shot attempt to save a few bits of
the reef from inevitable degradation. At worst, it’s a distraction from that
fate – and a diversion from addressing its causes.
The foundation has
standard governance structures, and the support of credible, dedicated
scientists. But what it does it essentially triage.
It’s now clear the
government understands that even in the best climate scenario, the Great
Barrier Reef will not survive in its recent form. The Department of Environment
and Energy acknowledged this just last month. Even the
Queensland tourism industry has publicly come to terms with the certainty
that the reef will continue to suffer from climate change.
Scientists have been
telling us since the 1980s that even modest climate change is a threat to coral
reefs. Corals are so sensitive to changes in temperature that even in the best
case warming scenario – achieving the 1.5 C stretch goal of the Paris Agreement
- it’s now estimated that only 10 per cent of the world’s reefs will survive in
their current form. At 2C, none are expected to escape “severe degradation and
annihilation”.
The foundation delivers
projects focused on “resilience,
restoration and innovation”.
That means doing its best to protect and restore the reef. It notes climate change is the biggest
threat, but it does not address greenhouse gas emissions, at either a local or
systemic level.
Its activities are
similar to those we’ve seen from several other reef-focused initiatives and
programs in recent years: breeding resilient corals, establishing small
refuges, developing monitoring tools, and supporting species such as turtles
and dugongs.
Projects like these have
been allocated hundreds of millions of dollars of federal government funding
through various programs over the years, including water
quality and run-off management along with contentious projects to removing Crown of Thorns
starfish, and more radical measures such as underwater fans to drive cooler
water from the depths. The foundation, for its part, reported recently on testing of a polymer “sun
shield”, noting
that the technology would only scale to smaller, “high value or high risk”
parts of the reef.
A good case can be made
that these experiments are pragmatic. Even if emissions stop tomorrow,
locked-in warming will continue to ravage the reef for the next few decades.
The foundation counts
respected research institutions among its partners, and scientists such as
Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg of the University of Queensland are on its
scientific advisory board. For Hoegh-Guldberg, who sounded the alarm on the
threat of climate for coral reefs in 1999, the foundation provides an important
opportunity to educate corporations on the dire state of the Great Barrier Reef
and climate in general. Again, its scientific review processes have not been
questioned.
However, it’s important
to remember that there's no guarantee these “resilience” activities will
succeed against a backdrop of waters reaching temperatures deadly to coral.
Whether portions of a complex marine ecosystem can be preserved, and in what
form, is still very much unknown. Professor Terry Hughes, a contender for world
leading coral reef expert, is dubious; in a Nature paper he found that
water quality and fishing pressure – two key ways of improving resilience -
made little difference in the face of devastating warm surges.
BACKGROUND
