By Agence France-Presse

Time is running out for Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef, with climate change set to wreck irreversible damage by 2030 unless immediate action is taken, marine scientists said Thursday.

In a report prepared for this month’s Earth Hour global climate change campaign, University of Queensland reef researcher Ove Hoegh-Guldberg said the world heritage site was at a turning point.

“If we don’t increase our commitment to solve the burgeoning stress from local and global sources, the reef will disappear,” he wrote in the foreword to the report.

“This is not a hunch or alarmist rhetoric by green activists. It is the conclusion of the world’s most qualified coral reef experts.”

Hoegh-Guldberg said scientific consensus was that hikes in carbon dioxide and the average global temperature were “almost certain to destroy the coral communities of the Great Barrier Reef for hundreds if not thousands of years”.

“It is highly unlikely that coral reefs will survive more than a two degree increase in average global temperature relative to pre-industrial levels,” he said.

“But if the current trajectory of carbon pollution levels continues unchecked, the world is on track for at least three degrees of warming. If we don’t act now, the climate change damage caused to our Great Barrier Reef by 2030 will be irreversible.”