Australia’s foreign minister Julie Bishop has publicly rebuked the US president Barack Obama for drawing attention to the vulnerability of the Great Barrier Reef because of climate change, and failing to acknowledge Australia’s remedial action.

In an interview with the ABC’s 7.30 Report from New York on Thursday night, Bishop said a recent speech by the American president in Brisbane “overlooked” Australian actions in preserving the reef.

She said there was an issue with the president’s remarks.

“We are demonstrating world’s best practice in working with the World Heritage Committee to ensure that the Great Barrier Reef is preserved for generations to come,” Bishop said on Thursday night.

“I think that president Obama might have overlooked that aspect of our commitment to conserving the Great Barrier Reef.”

Bishop said she understood why the Queensland government had issued a rebuttal to Washington. The Queensland premier Campbell Newman blamed green groups for spreading misinformation.

In a speech in Brisbane at the G20 last weekend, the US president said he had not yet had time to go to the Great Barrier Reef, but he wanted it to be protected so his daughters and generations to come could see the natural wonder. “I want that there, fifty years from now.”

“I know that there has been a healthy debate in this country about (climate change),” the president said. “Here in the Asia Pacific nobody has more at stake when it comes to thinking about, and then acting on, climate change.

“The incredible natural glory of the Great Barrier Reef is threatened. Worldwide this past summer was the hottest on record.”

The pointed comments from the visiting president followed the unveiling of a landmark deal mid-month between America and China to reduce their greenhouse gas output.

China has agreed to cap carbon emissions for the first time, and the US has committed achieving to deep reductions by 2025. The agreement is regarded as a game changing development for global climate talks.

The cooperation between the world’s two major emitters deeply embarrassed the Abbott government on the eve of the Brisbane G20 summit, and the comments in Brisbane from the American president compounded the political discomfort for the Coalition. The government was furious with the intervention.

Labor and the Greens have moved expeditiously to capitalise on the embarrassment domestically by pointing to the government’s repeal of carbon pricing, and its aspiration to wind back the renewable energy target.

The head of Unesco has said recently that the Australian government has started to listen to international concerns over the health of the reef.

The director general of the UN’s cultural and heritage body, Irina Bokova, told Guardian Australia in an interview in mid-November that she hoped the government’s plan for the reef would “reverse the trend” of its decline.

Bokova said Unesco’s world heritage committee was “very worried by the damage to the universal value of the Great Barrier Reef but now the government is listening, the government is starting to take serious measures”.

But the Australian Academy of Science has cast doubt over the efficacy of government action.

In its formal response to the Reef 2050 long-term sustainability plan drawn up by the Australian and Queensland governments – the Australian Academy of Science contends the strategy is “inadequate to achieve the goal of restoring or even maintaining the diminished outstanding universal value of the reef”.