The Australian government has invited journalists from around the world on an all-expenses paid trip to the Great Barrier Reef as part of intensifying diplomatic efforts to try to prevent the reef being placed on the Unesco world heritage committee’s “in-danger” list.

Guardian Australia has learned that journalists from Germany, France, the Philippines, India, Japan and Portugal are being flown to Australia for a week-long trip to see the reef and meet officials who will explain Australia’s conservation efforts. The countries are members of the world heritage committee.

The trip has been organised by the special Great Barrier Reef task force, established in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Dfat), to coordinate the “whole of government” lobbying effort to try to prevent the “in danger” listing when the Unesco committee meets in June.

Conservationists argue the Australian government should concentrate on improving the state of the Great Barrier Reef rather than trying to “spin” its existing efforts to journalists.

“Our concern is that the reef is in serious trouble and the government’s first concern should be protecting it, actually getting it out of danger, rather than trying to use a cynical exercise in spin to try to prevent its ‘in danger’ listing,” said Felicity Wishart, spokeswoman for the Australian Marine Conservation Society.

The government argues its intensive diplomatic efforts are needed to counter “misinformation” about the state of the reef being spread by conservationists.

The environment minister, Greg Hunt, visited German environment minister and world heritage committee chair Maria Boehmer in January and Senate estimates heard last month that ambassadors in all of the 21 countries on the committee had been enlisted in the lobbying effort, as well as consuls general and other staff.

“There is currently a campaign to list the Great Barrier Reef as in danger; we are doing all that we can to ensure the campaign does not succeed,” Dfat secretary Peter Varghese said.

“In the course of that campaign we think there are a number of assertions about the management of the Great Barrier Reef and its vulnerability which are not grounded in fact and which need to be rebutted.”

Conservationists have been running a counter-lobbying campaign, trying to convince financial institutions and Export-Import bank of the US not to invest in giant proposed coalmines in Queensland’s Galilee basin, adjacent to the reef, including the Carmichael mine proposed by Indian company Adani.

The program for the journalists’ trip, from 14 to 21 March, includes “calls on senior government officials, Australian business people, industry representatives, scientists and academics, including the chair of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Dr Russell Reichelt, and bureaucrats at the Department of the Environment.”

Journalists who have been invited include Christophe Hein from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Martine Valo from Le Monde, Howie Severino from GMA News in the Philippines, Urmi Goswami, from the Economic Times in India, Yasuyoshi Tanaka from the Mainichi Shimbun in Japan, Luis Ribeiro from the Visao Weekly magazine in Portugal, Gero Schliess from the Deutsche Welle, Tom Whipple from the Times and Pilita Clark, a former Sydney Morning Herald journalist, now with the Financial Times in London, as well as locally-based correspondents from the BBC, Bloomberg, the Economist, the New Scientist, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones newswires. It is not clear how many journalists accepted the invitation.

It is not unusual for governments to pay for journalists’ visits to present information about particular issues. Wishart said she was worried the government would try to present “misleading” information and said she would seek to present the journalists with alternative sources of information about the management of the reef.