Great Barrier Reef at risk: report

Targeting net zero by 2050 wouldn’t be enough to slow rising ocean temperatures to protect the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), a new report from Australia’s Climate Council said.

The report, released by the climate change communications organization on Monday, said if emissions continue at the current pace, coral bleaching could occur every two years by 2034 and annually by 2044.

“Already at around 1.1 degrees of global warming, we see tropical coral reefs suffering an enormous amount of damage,” research director at the Climate Council and one of the authors of the report, Simon Bradshaw, told the Xinhua News Agency.

“The Great Barrier Reef has had massive bleaching events a number of times now in close succession, with very little time for the reef to recover. If warming rises to over 1.5 degrees, then it may be impossible for tropical coral reefs to survive,” he said. “It’s definitely too late to get to the actions we take now this year through the 2020s.”

The report found 2021 was the warmest year on record for the world’s oceans and the 2,300-kilometer World Heritage site could not survive under those conditions.

“If the Great Barrier Reef is in this much trouble, it means that coral reefs worldwide are in a lot of trouble,” Bradshaw said in a statement.

To avoid a climate catastrophe and best protect the Great Barrier Reef, the Climate Council recommends Australia triple its efforts and take bold measures to reduce its national emissions 75 percent by 2030, and reach net zero by 2035.

As a first step, the Australian government should match key allies and commit to halving emissions this decade, the report said.

“It’s very clear that the world as a whole needs to halve emissions this decade. And for a wealthy developed country like Australia, we have to be going further than that,” Bradshaw said.