Funding for Great Barrier Reef water quality falls despite 'crisis'   

25 April 2018
The Age


Commonwealth funding to arrest declining water quality on the Great Barrier Reef has dropped by more than $11 million a year, internal government figures suggest, despite growing concerns over threats to the reef.   

The figures have emerged weeks out from the federal budget, which critics last year said ignored the coral bleaching crisis that has severely damaged the reef, as well as other environmental problems that are expected to hurt tourism and jobs.


Federal government funding to improve reef water quality has declined, figures show.

Flight Centre founder Graham Turner said more Commonwealth funding is needed to protect the reef, and former government official Adam Smith said current funding levels were “probably not adequate”.

After climate change, poor water quality is the most pressing problem facing the reef. It is largely caused by nutrient, pesticide and sediment run-off from agriculture and coastal development. It can cause algal growth at the expense of coral, block light and smother corals, as well as exacerbate outbreaks of the venomous crown-of-thorns starfish, which are a major cause of coral loss.

Official figures obtained by Fairfax Media show the Turnbull government will spend $154 million improving reef water quality over five years from July 2017.


However separate documents show it was expected to spend $212 million over five years from July 2015 - representing a fall of $58 million, or more than $11 million a year.   


Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg said the government was committed to the Reef 2050 plan.


The office of Minister for the Environment and Energy Josh Frydenberg did not dispute the figures.

Mr Frydenberg said his government was “investing, alongside the Queensland government, $2 billion over the next decade to improve the health of the Great Barrier Reef” and is committed to the Reef 2050 Long Term Sustainability Plan.

Experts widely believe that the most immediate water quality targets in that plan will not be met.

A 2017 report by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee – which in recent years considered listing the Great Barrier Reef as "in danger" - said progress towards achieving the targets has been “slow” and the government should “accelerate its efforts ... to ensure that all measures which are necessary to achieve them are taken”.

Deloitte Access Economics last year put the Great Barrier Reef’s total asset value at $56 billion and said it supports 64,000 jobs.

Flight Centre co-founder Graham Turner, who is tipped to join the billionaire ranks of the Financial Review Rich List in May, said the reef “has an ecosystem that’s fairly sensitive and needs protecting”.


Flight Centre cofounder Graham Turner said the sensitive Great Barrier Reef needed protecting.

Mr Turner, an environmentalist, said “everyone” would like to see more federal funding for the reef, including for research to determine the most effective solutions to improve water quality and incentives for farmers to improve their practices.

“If ... how we minimise that nitrate pollution is important, the farmers aren’t the people who should take all the pain on that. It should be the whole of Australia that contributes,” he said.

Former Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority official Adam Smith, who left the organisation in 2014 after 15 years, said the reef was in “crisis” and funding should be increased.

“At the moment the federal government funding is probably not adequate,” said Dr Smith, who directed environmental assessment and management at the agency.

He said the reef probably needed “five or 10 times” the current investment promised by the Commonwealth – but added that business, state governments and communities all had a role to play in protecting the reef.

Great Barrier Reef Foundation managing director Anna Marsden, whose organisation partners with big business to fund reef research, said action was needed to restore the reef after successive coral bleaching events.

“We’ve lost so much of the world’s reefs in the last two years, and there still remains the grand challenge of how to restore a reef at scale ... no country on the planet has been able to really crack the technology,” she said.

WWF Australia and the Australian Conservation Foundation say $475 million a year is needed to address the reef's water quality.

WWF senior manager for reef and water, Sean Hoobin, cited government reports that had also pointed to a funding shortfall.

"The World Heritage Committee has asked for an acceleration in efforts to achieve water quality targets yet the Australian government’s response is to significantly slash budgets. This isn’t good enough," he said.   

Jovial Monk wrote on Apr 25^th, 2018 at 9:10am:



BS the reefs are recovering nicely.

"Great Barrier Reef starts to recover after severe coral bleaching, survey of sites between Cairns and Townsville shows"

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-09-29/coral-regeneration-raises-hopes-for-great-...

Not bad for a DEAD reef.

Now the good news -

"future adaptation of the common coral Acropora millepora on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Genomics-derived migration rates were high (0.1–1% of immigrants per generation across half the latitudinal range of the GBR) and closely matched the biophysical model of larval dispersal. Both genetic and biophysical models indicated the prevalence of southward migration along the GBR that would facilitate the spread of heat-tolerant alleles to higher latitudes as the climate warms. We developed an individual-based metapopulation model of polygenic adaptation and parameterized it with population sizes and migration rates derived from the genomic analysis. We find that high migration rates do not disrupt local thermal adaptation, and that the resulting standing genetic variation should be sufficient to fuel rapid region-wide adaptation of A. millepora populations to gradual warming over the next 20–50 coral generations (100–250 years)."

and the bad news -

" Despite this capacity for adaptation, our model predicts that coral populations would become increasingly sensitive to random thermal fluctuations such as ENSO cycles or heat waves, which corresponds well with the recent increase in frequency of catastrophic coral bleaching events."

http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1007220

So they modelled the life-cycles, which agreed with observations, and then projected the modelled life-cycles.

Of course you would expect corals to be somewhat heat tolerant as they have been around for about 450 Million years and survived both warmer and cooler periods.

Jovial Monk wrote on Apr 25^th, 2018 at 12:23pm:


Yeah. Pity you can't post any evidence.

Why in years past when it was warmer than now didn't they die off completely?


Maybe it was because there were warmer conditions and cooler conditions and they didn't throw coral polyps into hot water and expect them to acclimatise straight away.

Jovial Monk wrote on Apr 25^th, 2018 at 12:49pm:



Have they released the autopsies yet? Or were they just there for the viewing?

Jovial Monk wrote on Apr 25^th, 2018 at 12:49pm:


I thought you only quoted scientists. They are POLITICIANS.

Jovial Monk wrote on Apr 25^th, 2018 at 1:16pm:



and to prove your no scientist .

If the ice age is to progress it actually has to be here. This:



Shows ice is disappearing from the Arctic. It is disappearing from the Antarctic too.

No ice age. No coral recovery.

Different reefs within the GBR, Lees.

Why not read the links I gave earlier?