Australian corals reefs have been pummelled by unprecedented heat stress up to two times worse than has ever been recorded.
Roughly half of Western Australia’s (WA) coastline, including the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Ningaloo, has been enduring a reef-threatening marine heatwave and molecular ecologist Kate Quigley warns higher temperatures are yet to subside.
“The amount of warming so far dwarfs the warming that had previously been seen on places like the Great Barrier Reef, which led to catastrophic bleaching and mortality in 2016 and 2017,” she said.
Providing an update on WA’s troubled reefs at the Indian Ocean Forum in Perth, Minderoo’s principal research scientist said the “underwater bushfire” was causing widespread bleaching.
The ghostly colouring is a recognisable sign of heat stress but corals can recover, though the likelihood of mortality increases the longer temperatures stay elevated.
Quigley said in some extreme cases, corals were skipping the adaptive bleaching response to go “straight to death.”
“Instead of actually bleaching, the tissue just comes off the skeleton,” she said.
The scientist stressed stopping “the disease of climate change” was the answer to the world’s coral reef woes, rather than trying to address the symptoms.
The two-day event hosted by the French Embassy in Australia and the Minderoo Foundation is designed to gather perspectives from the Indian Ocean ahead of the Third United Nations Ocean Conference, to be held in Nice in June.
Businessman and philanthropist Andrew Forrest, who has a PhD in marine science, said the bleaching on the reefs was “quite devastating.”
“We really need to grasp the fact that the greatest economic opportunity for business and the necessity for science is to stop building fossil fuels,” he said at the forum.
Roughly a quarter of all marine life rely on coral reefs at some stage in their life cycle and more than one billion people globally benefit from the tourism dollars and food security they offer.
Forrest additionally called for a crackdown on the high seas fishing industry known for overfishing and poor labour practices.
His remarks were followed by a promise from Australia’s Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy Josh Wilson to ratify a global pact to protect marine biodiversity outside national jurisdiction “as soon as possible” under a re-elected Labor government.
“The treaty will deliver stronger protection for the ocean, including the provisions within it for establishing marine protected areas in high seas, which we desperately must have,” Wilson told the conference.
Australia was a founding signatory of the historic High Seas Biodiversity Treaty that’s expected to help reach a global target to protect 30 percent of the world’s marine areas by 2030.
Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef, which has been enduring its own bleaching event in its north, has attracted funding for school excursions as part of the ongoing federal election campaign.
