The second project is close to the coast, restoring coastal wetlands further north at Ingham, on badly-degraded land that once acted as a natural sieve for nutrients before they flowed out onto the reef. During a visit from Sir Richard Branson to Australia last year, Greening Australia and Virgin Australia announced a partnership to progressively restore 700 hectares of coastal wetlands and 2000 hectares of badly-eroded gullies. This week, they demonstrated the results from the investigation stage of the two pilot projects. Greening Australia chief executive Brendan Foran said they refused to accept the misconception that the Great Barrier Reef was dead. “Studies we’ve done have demonstrated that our technique of reshaping and resurfacing the land and then planting it with native trees and shrubs can reduce the amount of sediment flowing onto the reef by up to 70 per cent in some areas,” he said.

They now hope to scale up these projects to cover 35 different regions alongside the Great Barrier Reef by 2030. Greening Australia chief executive Brendan Foran listens to wetlands expert Niall Connolly. Credit:Annette Ruzicka Damon Telfer, Greening Australia’s gully erosion expert, said there were 64 hectares of badly-eroded gullies on one 35,000 hectare cattle property beside the Burdekin River. “In one gully on that property there is 370 tonnes of sediment per hectare from that one gully, so that gully is exporting 2000 tonnes of soil per year,” he said. “So from that very tiny area, there is a huge amount of sediment being washed downstream.”

Mr Telfer said they believed there was a bigger public benefit in improving Great Barrier Reef water quality than the private benefits to cattle property owners. He said property owners could run “an extra 20 head of cattle” on poor-quality land if they repaired the gullies. “There is no incentive for a landholder to address these issues, but all the benefits are felt on the reef,” Mr Telfer said. “There is a high public benefit and very little private benefit, so it’s a great justification from an organisation like Greening Australia to get involved with landholders and assist them to do work on their properties." At Ingham, a team of water system experts have started to restore a coastal wetlands area in the Herbert River catchment on an Indigenous-owned cattle property called Mungalla.

Birdlife at the Mungulla Wetlands. Credit:Annette Ruzicka Wetlands expert Niall Connolly said the Mungalla wetlands was the first of three where, by reintroducing saltwater to the wetlands system, immediate improvements were noticed. The CSIRO has previously made improvements to the site and the Greening Australia project is building from that foundation, Mr Connolly said. A 40-centimetre thick mat of Salvinia weed that had infested the wetlands lagoon was almost gone and a native sedge has returned, letting water birds feed on water chestnuts. “It was getting no aeration, the weeds had stopped the birds landing on the water. It was just not a functioning system,” Mr Connolly said.

In three years, the water has cleared, dissolved oxygen is returning to the water – although levels are still low – and 84 bird species have been noted by Bird Life Australia at the lagoon. Virgin Australia head of sustainability Robert Wood said he was impressed at the improvements at Mungalla’s wetlands and looked forward to now expanding the work at Mungalla. “We’re very excited to see the next stage of Reef Aid unfold at Mungalla and are proud to be acknowledging this property by naming one of our aircraft after its valuable wetlands,” he said.