Got to accept it’s in decline (Image: Marco Moretti/Anzenberger/eyevine)

The Australian government’s plan to maintain the quality of the Great Barrier Reef is doomed to failure.

That’s the opinion of the Australian Academy of Science, the country’s equivalent of the Royal Society of London. In a response to the government’s draft Reef 2050 Long-Term Sustainability Plan, the academy blasted the plan as “inadequate to achieve the goal of restoring or even maintaining the diminished Outstanding Universal Value of the Reef”.

Although the document acknowledges climate change and other dangers like dredging and agricultural run-off, it fails to provide effective solutions to address any of these pressures, the response says.


“It is more than disappointing to see that the biggest threat to the reef – climate change – is virtually ignored in this plan,” says Academy Fellow Terry Hughes from James Cook University in Queensland, Australia.

“It’s not even possible to maintain the current degraded state of the reef without people doing something about climate change,” says Jon Brodie, also from James Cook University, who helped write some of the report. He says the plan needs a clear statement that the aims are “impossible” unless climate change is addressed.

Impossible targets

The plan doesn’t question the need for four port expansions that will involve dredging inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, and only prohibits dredging for any ports additional to these. Brodie says the plan should have insisted the preference for port building inside the world heritage area to involve no dredging – which can be achieved using long jetties as an alternative. In some places that won’t be possible, but in those cases Brodie says the plan should include a discussion of options for what to do with the spoil.

“It’s a really pathetic effort on the ports, let’s face it,” says Brodie.

The only numerical targets in the plan are 2018 targets for reducing agricultural run-off. But those numbers are arbitrary and have no ecological significance. “There’s no scientific connection there,” he says. What’s more, Brodie points out the Queensland government plans to double its agricultural output by 2040, which will make even those targets impossible to meet.

Overall, Brodie says the main problem with the plan is that it doesn’t accept that the reef is in decline. “That’s nonsense and was contradicted by the [Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority’s] own report from 2014.”