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Not Waving, Drowning
Murray Hogarth It was threatened by the crown-of-thorns and joh Bjelke-Petersen, but then came World Heritage listing and scientists told us the Great Barrier Reef was safe. Now, it seems, they were in denial. Leaked documents and damming photographic evidence reveal how we are carelessly killing off the most magnificent coral fields in the world. Tom Goreau is a brash New Yorker, the enfant terrible of international coral science who has been warning for years that the world's reefs are doomed. He has been branded an extremist and his warnings have gone unheeded. Until now.
This year's temperatures have been the hottest recorded and the world's reefs are in trouble. As Goreau has been predicting for nearly a decade, corals are being maimed and killed as never before in human memory. Just a 1°C rise in average maximum water temperatures for three weeks can be lethal. The Barrier Reef has suffered unprecedented "bleaching", as the phenomenon is known, but it still escaped lightly compared with Indian Ocean reefs. In the Maldives, where reefs underpin the whole economy, up to 90 per cent of corals have died. In Vietnam's waters, a thousand-year-old giant coral colony bigger than a bus has been killed. The reefs' nadir was 1998, the International Year of the Ocean, which followed the Year of the Reef. Satellite data from the United States National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration shows a clear warming trend in sea surface temperatures since 1982, and a soon-to-be-published study forecasts rises of up to 5°C in tropical waters over the next century. Around Townsville, water temperatures reached an unusually hot 32°C in February this year. The heat followed dramatic floods in January, which caused a major drop in salinity levels in local waters. Both these stresses contributed to the bleaching, whereby coral formations turn translucent white and sometimes fluorescent pinks and blues. The stress reaction involves coral polyps, which are animals, expelling microscopic plant cells, called zooxanthellae, which inhabits their cells. Normally, there is symbiosis between plant and animal: the plants feed off polyp wastes and create food for the animals by photosynthesis. This partnership has built the entire Barrier Reef over the past 7,000 years, but plant and animal cannot thrive apart. Sometimes coral recovers from bleaching, taking back the zooxanthellae. But often it dies. Nearly 70 years ago, Sir Maurice Yonge described bleaching as a natural event in Australian waters. But that was bleaching on a small, localized scale, such as in an overheated tidal pool. Mass bleaching was first observed in 1979-80, has occurred regularly since and hit a disastrous peak in this year's record heat. Goreau believes that if it keeps getting hotter due to human-induced global warming, as predicted by a panel of 2,500 top climatologists, then reefs are doomed. "The catastrophe is going to hit," he says. Dr Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is a leading reef researcher from the University of Sydney who, like Goreau, has been viewed with suspicion by his more conservative peers. But this suspicion is abating, precipitated by this year's outbreak of bleaching. "There has been a watershed in the last few months," says Hoegh-Guldberg. "People had been trying to be careful and cautious and so forth. But now there is a sense of urgency, I think, because of the rate of change." Hoegh-Guldberg, Goreau and even their former critics see coral reefs as "canaries in the coal mine", foreshadowing the wider impacts of a warming world. But global warming is only one of the threats to the reef. Rising nutrient levels caused by runoff from agricultural activity on land have killed much of the inshore hard corals. A decade ago, engineer Peter Bell's research on the Low Isles off Port Douglas revealed that extraordinarily low levels of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous are crucial if beautiful hard corals are to outgrow comparatively ugly algae. But Bell, too, was branded an alarmist by those he calls the "Coral Club". Recently, he has found that elevated phosphorous levels feed toxic blooms of microscopic blue-green algae called Trichodesium. The Trichodesium then draws nitrogen in massive quantities from the atmosphere, adding to that already flowing into reef waters from sewage outfalls and run-offs from farm and grazing lands. "It's like having fertilizer factories in the water," says Bell. With the extra nitrogen, other algae grow. And, in a vicious cycle for corals, more algae means warmer water. "You have this animal that likes living in clear water," says Bell, "and suddenly it is living in semi-diluted sewage. The foundation to life on the reef is the algae. If you disturb the foundation, the whole thing will topple." One factor in last summer's unusual heat was El Nino, which produced weather extremes around the world. The latest official global-warming predictions, which include air-temperature rises of 2°C within 50 years, have El Ninos becoming more frequent and more severe. The arch villain in this global-warming scenario is the burning of fossil fuels such as oil and coal, which causes carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases to build up in the atmosphere. As the air gets hotter, so does the sea. Bizarre and perverse, then, is a proposal to develop a massive new fossil fuel industry bang-slap on Queensland's reef coastline. Buried on the shore, sometimes extending into the water and even into the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, are huge deposits of oil shale. The volume of the resource, and the value if it is mined, is mind-boggling - potentially 29 billion barrels of oil worth an estimated $500 billion. It's the equivalent of another North Sea at a time when known oil-well reserves are being forecast to run down by 2050. That's about when Goreau fears that coral reefs will be gone. Exploiting oil shale could mean prolonging our lazy dependence on petroleum, just when even giant oil companies such as BP are moving in a big way into renewable solar power technology. And on the basis of proven technology, oil from shale is the most greenhouse-polluting fossil fuel of all. It's hardly surprising, then, that Queensland's unique juxtaposition of vast oil-shale reserves and vast coral fields has become a focus of international concern for the future of the reef. Although the mining proposal came to international attention only this year, two companies, Southern Pacific Petroleum and Central Pacific Minerals, have been fossicking around oil shale for nearly three decades. Their corporate patriarch, Sir Ian McFarlane, is a relic of the Queensland of Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, a knight of the long-serving National Party premier's realm. McFarlane saw black gold in shale when Bjelke-Petersen was urging others to drill for oil on the reef itself. Several years ago, McFarlane's twin companies were joined by Canadian group Suncor Energy, which mines oil from tar sands on its home turf in Alberta. In June this year, The Sydney Morning Herald published extracts from leaked government documents which revealed alarm among reef authorities about a new kind of oil industry starting on the coastline. When the Queensland and Federal governments cleared the way five years ago for a $250 million oil shale "pilot plant" near Gladstone, no-one consulted the official guardians of the reef, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA). The first oil is expected next year, with the governments providing grants and incentives worth up to $244 million by 2006. By 2007, the oil shale companies want a huge production plant, producing 85,000 barrels of oil a day, with smokestacks lining the World Heritage coastline, tankers plying reef waters and mining operations to dwarf even Central Queensland's vast coal mines. Ultimately, they envisage producing 1.5 million barrels a day at a series of sites. Naturally, a battle royal is brewing between the companies and the environment movement, which has been looking for causes to energize its troops and revive flagging fortunes. What better than a massive new fossil fuel industry right next to an already beleaguered natural wonder of the world? On the conservation side, Greenpeace is leading the charge, targeting Suncor in Australia and Canada, and fighting the public relations war on battlefields such as last month's United Nations climate change summit in Argentina. Oil shale is scheduled to hit major production just as Australia and other developed nations have to live up to the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse pollution. The companies know they have a fight on their hands. They are countering with a climate change strategy, including the promise of new technology to reduce greenhouse emissions from oil shale production and a major tree-planting trial to "capture" the main global warming gas, carbon dioxide. They also have hired top environmental consultants from Ecos Corporation, in the shape of former Greenpeace International executive director Paul Gilding and former high-profile ABC Television environment reporter Alan Tate. These green-savvy guns-for-hire contend that oil shale dollars will help fund a brave new world of sustainable energy. A recent document leaked to the Democrats, who also obtained the first evidence of the Marine Park Authority's internal alarm over oil shale, shows the companies' line. This leak is a briefing letter from the oil shale companies to a Canberra lobbyist, aimed at wooing the new Minister for Industry, Science and Resources, Senator Nick Minchin, and "other targets". Their message will be one of environmental responsibility and economic bounty, including 5,000 jobs and a $15 billion improvement in the balance of payments over the lifetime of just the first oil shale mine. The Commonwealth has responded to the embarrassment caused by the first leak with an exhaustive Australian Federal Police investigation to find the perpetrator, presumably within Environment Australia or the Marine Park Authority. At the same rime, authority chairman Dr Ian McPhail warned his staff that public servants face jail sentences if they are caught leaking. So what about openness and transparency in management of one of the world's natural wonders? McPhail is unapologetic: "I did make it clear that if you are professionals and you take the king's shilling, then matters of government should remain confidential. A pattern of leaks puts an organization at serious risk inside government. It will be excluded." At the Townsville symposium last month, scientist after scientist told good weekend that GBRMPA had been instructed by the greenhouse-sensitive Federal Government not to link coral bleaching and global warming. McPhail denies ever receiving such an edict. That week, just as Goreau and other world experts were preparing evidence for exactly that link, McPhail put out a major press release proclaiming the reef is in "good shape" and blaming bleaching on the 1997-98 wet season. "My position is, it is not for us to make those linkages," says McPhail. At this point, the journalist should declare an interest. For me, the oil shale controversy stirred memories of being young on the Queensland coast. I grew up in Bundaberg, at the southern end of the Barrier Reef, near an oil shale deposit at Lowmead to the north. As a child, I holidayed on reef islands, snorkeled in azure lagoons on the outer reef and marveled as so many before and since have done at the life and colors. As a young man, I fished the remote Swains with my father. I sailed in a yacht race around perilous Lady Elliott Island in the dark of night. I even dallied romantically on the national park beach of Lady Musgrave, a true coral cay. In those days, I never dreamed anything so big could be so vulnerable. Many people think the same way. The reef is the planet's biggest World Heritage area. It has more than 2,800 coral reefs, spread over 350,000 square kilometres. There are hundreds of islands, the vast inner-reef lagoon and a swath of continental shelf. There are about 350 coral species, 1,500 species of fish, 4,000 species of mollusks, and many other flora and fauna. My awakening to the Barrier Reef's growing peril began nine months ago, before oil shale hit the news, at the height of the bleaching damage in Australian waters. I was flying in a light plane out of Townsville, trawling for a reef story. It soon became apparent that times are turning bad for the world's reefs. Even for the greatest of them all. From take-off, the magnificent reef vista opened up. But during two hours in the air, over sea, islands and the tropical mainland, my coral comfort zone was smashed. It was a trip that tourism operators, who loathe media coverage of bleaching and other reef damage, never want you to take. Within sight of the Marine Park Authority's Townsville headquarters is the once-magic Nelly Bay, on Magnetic Island, scarred by the bulldozing of a green headland a decade ago to build a marina breakwater. The bare earth still stands out; long after the developers abandoned the project. We flew on, to corals turned ghostly white by bleaching. "Anything you can see from an airplane is pretty significant ecologically," observed Dr Terry Done, a veteran of Australian reef research, who is now president of the International Society for Reef Studies. Later Done told me of his own reef awakening early this year. "For years I have been the scientist who will say, 'She'll be right. It is very big,'" he confessed. Now his cozy optimism is gone, his confidence shaken. He worries about perils so large, so insidious, that even size doesn't matter. "There is a great element of denial among everyone," Done warns. What he sees is a vision of the reef's demise, fuelled by the cumulative impacts of all the forces - natural and human- influenced, in the sea, on the land and up in the air - that can hurt reef ecosystems: outbreaks of the coral-devouring crown-of-thorns starfish, powerful cyclones, huge floods, giant irrigation dams for cane and, more recently, cotton farming. El Nino, the barbed hooks and scything nets used in fishing, a million tourists a year, the developers who build resorts and marinas. And global warming. Until recently, Terry Done was blasé about global warming and greenhouse gas pollution of the atmosphere. He contributed to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, basically telling its 2,500 scientists not to worry about reefs. "I had no idea," he recalls. "I was saying 'a bit more water, she'll be right'." Now he's embarrassed, and not just because of bleaching. His wake-up call came when French scientist Jean Pierre Gattuso postulated that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reduce calcification rates in tropical waters. That means slower and weaker coral growth, at a time when the forces that damage corals are becoming more severe and more frequent. "I think it is the underwater equivalent of acid rain," says Done. But the bleaching is bad enough. If Tom Goreau and a growing body of scientists are right, the bleaching alone is enough to kill most reefs stone-dead within 50 years. One of Done's PhD students, Kristen Michalek-Wagner, reported that, beneath the water, parts of the Great Barrier Reef were like a "graveyard". Michalek-Wagner, a young German, had come from Hamburg hoping to study life, not death and decay. In Europe, she says, "everything is dead and you just study how dead it is". Another Done assistant, Dr Katharina Fabricius, also comes from the Hamburg school of dead ecosystems. Her work echoes that of Peter Bell at Low Isles, charting the decline of fringing reefs along the Queensland coastline, with hard corals being replaced by faster-growing soft corals and algae fed by rising nutrient levels. Coral gardens found near the coast when the reef was more pristine are now found only on outer reefs. If you think of the reef as an underwater forest, then losing the hard corals to algae is like cutting out old-growth diversity and replacing it with a plantation monoculture. Nutrient and sediment levels in the Barrier Reef lagoon, that vast waterway between the coast and the outer reefs, are up fourfold on pre-European settlement levels. Many inshore reefs are almost gone. Our flight crossed the lagoon where the nets of prawn trawlers regularly thrash the seabed like so many submarine harvesters, stirring up the growing load of sediments. The waters are often turbid and tropical beaches get slimed. It's clearfelling underwater, say conservationists. They want trawling stopped, just as rainforest logging was when the neighboring Wet Tropics World Heritage Area was declared a decade ago. But what has been happening under the water has been out of sight, out of mind. Last month, however, the CSIRO completed a $5 million, five-year study for the Marine Park Authority of trawling's impact on the lagoon and inter-reef areas of the marine park's far-northern region. It shows that, for each ton of prawns netted, 6-10 tons of "bycatch" such as small fish, crustaceans, even endangered sea turtles, are caught and die. Each sweep of a trawl net removes between 5 percent and 25 percent of seabed life, especially sponges and flower pot corals. Trawling is changing the composition of life in an area that is home to up to 1,000 life forms. Eighty per cent of the marine park is officially open to trawling; but 40 to 50 trawlers regularly operate illegally even in one of the marine park’s most important “green zones”, which are meant to be fully protected. Instead of making the full report on trawling public immediately, the Commonwealth held up its release for weeks so that Environment Minister Senator Robert Hill could "read it". In the meantime, the spin doctors of the fishing industry selectively released more positive aspects of the report to the media. Aboard the little Cessna, our route took us over the busy shipping lane, trafficked by everything from drug runners to tankers, at constant risk of oil spills. Then we passed over Bramble Reef, where sea life is struggling to recover after being depleted to the point of exhaustion by over-fishing, including by Townsville's recreational anglers. For two years, it has had to be closed to all fishing, for replenishment. After Bramble, the plane banked and turned back to a lush green coastline pockmarked by human development: the highly controversial Port Hinchinbrook resort project, sprawling aquaculture farms for prawns, expanding canelands amid shrinking wetlands, a sugar port. And shortly before we landed, the huge Yabula nickel refinery with its smokestacks and near-satanic black tailings pond. Days later I moved north to Port Douglas, the tourism hotspot of Far North Queensland, where huge catamarans and dive boats take thousands of visitors to the reef each day and dump their sewage in the sea on the way home. It is a symbol of contempt for the reef environment, with onshore disposal long contemplated, but yet to be delivered. After a week away, in Townsville, Cairns and Port Douglas, I returned to Sydney and rushed to tell family, friends and anyone who would listen that I had seen a vision of how the reef could die next century. In my children's lifetime. The first editor I pitched the story to was interested, but dubious. He'd heard, and read, and watched too many "the reef is doomed" stories. Scientists, too, have been made skeptical by the reef equivalent of crying wolf, especially regarding the crown-of-thorns starfish, which is cited by some as a reason to avoid being too alarmist about bleaching. Terry Done, for example, speaks of his earlier aversion to "conservationists and scientists who see a bit of dead coral and say that the sky is falling". (Now, Done fears, the sky is not so much falling as changing composition for the worse.) Faced with doubts, I took a reality check. Professor Frank Talbot, of Sydney’s Macquarie University, a grandee of ref science in Australia, is a founder of two major research stations (at One Tree Island and Lizard Island) with an outstanding international reputation. While he seethed about the Hinchinbrook resort development I had seen during my flight, he was relaxed about the reef as a whole. "It's so big," he explained. For a while, my reef story went on the journalistic backburner. But then the flame started to burn hotter again. There was a tip-off that UNESCO and World Heritage authorities based in Paris were growing increasingly concerned about the reef's safety. Then came the oil shale leak and, in September, Frank Talbot and two other eminent reef experts penned a confidential letter to the World Heritage Bureau in Paris, pleading for international intervention. They sought a field mission to Australia to investigate allegations that the Federal and State governments, and the Marine Park Authority, were failing in their duty of care. "Unless this is done," the letter ends, "and the governments are made aware that their conduct is under scrutiny, the bureau will be presiding over the slow death of the greatest exemplar of coral reefs on the globe." The origins of the authority and the marine park lie in the 1970s, when the Whitlam Labor Government vowed to protect the reef from the oil-drilling ambitions of maverick premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who owned shares in one of the exploration outfits. To this day, 26 areas down the coast remain outside the marine park, as reserves for development. Canberra's founding vision was one of conservation being the "paramount aim" but, over time, a doctrine of "multiple use" took over. A real conservation agenda, meeting the scientific precautionary principle of not undertaking activities or developments, unless it is certain they will not harm the environment, would restrict nearly every human activity east of the Great Dividing Range. And on Queensland's politically swinging coast, with its long line of marginal State and Federal seats, the chance of restricting development in water catchments for the reef appears non-existent. Indeed, the politics of the reef territory are so tough that major political parties tread carefully. Only the Democrats, whose focus is on Senate seats and big-city votes, run hard on defending the reef. Less than 5 per cent of the entire park is in protected zones analogous with land-based national parks, and only oil drilling and mining are banned outright in the rest. Global warming aside, the greatest threats of all are on the land, beyond GBRMPA's often timid reach. The authority likes to promote itself as a role model for marine park management everywhere. But, like the reef, its survival is uncertain. The Federal Government has slashed its funding, it is often ignored by the Queensland Government and it is regularly attacked by the powerful tourism and commercial fishing lobbies. When the Howard Government came to power in 1996, GBRMPA was on a hit list. It has survived, but lost its spirit as well as funding. The Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators, mainly representing big Japanese-owned tour boat companies, attacked GBRMPA last year in a letter to the Federal Government. The authority was a "bureaucratic monolith" that could be "significantly downsized", the letter said. Others believe it is under-staffed, under-powered and badly under-funded. Authority chief Ian McPhail says that a staff of 110 responsible for an area bigger than many nations is hardly a monolith. Even among those scientists and conservationists who would prefer to be the authority's friends, it has harsh critics. Jeremy Tager, director of the Townsville-based North Queensland Conservation Council, likens GBRMPA's malaise to the organizational equivalent of "battered spouse syndrome". Plummeting morale and a staff brain drain over recent years are a common complaint. Insiders speak of political interference and of scientific monitoring that does not address the real problems. "There is not the passion there," says Frank Talbot, the reef veteran. "You do not feel these people are seriously trying to protect this reef. They do not do battle. They are bureaucrats." The guardian of the reef is like a tired swimmer in trouble in big surf. It's trying to keep its head above water, but it keeps slipping under, the waves are getting bigger and tricky new currents are appearing. Nearly all the problems faced at the authority's inception 21 years ago still exist. Many have become bigger. Others refuse to fade. There are still prospects for oil and gas exploration onshore, immediately adjacent to the reef, such as in the Laura Basin on Cape York. New technology allows wells to be drilled from land, horizontally, for more than 30 kilometers offshore. And Queensland is pushing for a giant $3 billion gas pipeline down the entire coast, bringing cheap new energy from Papua New Guinea to fuel more coastal industry. The old bogey, the crown-of-thorns starfish, is again massing in northern reef waters and the third major outbreak since 1960 is expected. Last year's conservation coup was meant to be the creation of special dugong protection zones after a dramatic fall in numbers of the threatened sea cows, blamed in part on gill-net fishing and shark nets. But dozens more dugong are turning up dead on beaches this year. It is environmental groups, rather than GBRMPA, that are trying to use the Commonwealth's own laws protecting threatened species to upgrade reef protection. The Humane Society International, with more than four million members in the US, is seeking to have both trawling and cane farming listed as "key threatening processes" for endangered reef-zone species. Environmentalists and recreational fishermen are at loggerheads with the sugar industry over at least 30 fish kills this year and a growing incidence of "red spot" disease, both being blamed mainly on acid sulphate soil run-off from cane farms in particular. But, at the same time, huge expansion of the sugar industry in the coastal belt is being pushed by a $200 million restructuring package funded by Queensland and the Commonwealth. A major international report called Reefs at Risk, released this year by the World Resources Institute, estimates that 29 per cent of the marine park's reefs, covering 13,700 square kilometers, face a medium risk and 1 per cent (600 square kilometers), a high risk. But GBRMPA's enduring mantra is that the reef is "in good shape and in good hands". Meanwhile, major new threats to the reef environment keep emerging. There is the live fish trade, which targets the biggest and best of reef fish for Chinese banquets in Asia. The big-money trade's quest for maori wrasse, coral trout, barramundi cod and other exquisite fish has devastated reefs to Australia's north, where fishermen use dynamite and cyanide. In the past few years it has progressed down under, with only the Asian economic crisis keeping demand in check. From around the world, including on the Barrier Reef, there are alarming reports of coral diseases previously unknown to science. Some are bacterial, some fungal. Finally, there is the specter of global warming, with its growing list of perils for reefs: more powerful cyclones to pound them; more frequent and more intense El Ninos (and the counter-cycle La Ninas) bringing extremes of weather including more floods; rising sea-surface temperatures; and even reduced calcification rates in the water. "Reefs are affected by everything," says Tom Goreau. "They are the ultimate downstream ecosystem and they are the best test of ecologically sustainable development." After I interviewed Ian McPhail, he sought another meeting to clarify several points. He'd been "a bit on the back foot" in the first round, he said. He was worried about who I was listening to. "I am not in the business of skillfully managing the slow degradation of the Great Barrier Reef," he insisted, unprompted. "I believe in the past five years we have put the conservation of the Great Barrier Reef up on a high pedestal." In June next year, the UN's World Heritage authorities will assess whether that pedestal is high enough. As with Kakadu National Park and its Jabiluka uranium mine controversy, Australia's management of the reef is now under review by the planet's masters of conservation. A report on the reef by the UN's formal technical advisers in Australia, obtained by good weekend, lists a litany of threats: trawling, the live fish trade, aquaculture, coastal development (including on islands), neighboring land use, dam construction, pollution, oil spills, oil shale mining, crown-of-thorns starfish and global warming. The report cites wide support for more high-protection areas, identifies a "critical need" for more management resources for the Marine Park Authority, and calls for control over inappropriate activities and development on land. It warns of inadequate scientific knowledge and monitoring, poor enforcement, and jurisdictional confusion which allow issues to "slip between the cracks". It seems the world has stopped believing that all is well with World Heritage icons entrusted to Australia's care. Yet for all its problems, the Barrier Reef almost certainly is still the best-preserved, best-managed coral community of any great size in the world. The shame is that this is cold comfort in a warming world, where most reefs are already badly damaged and many are near death. Murray Hogarth is environment editor for The Sydney Morning Herald. |
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As a child, Goreau
was surrounded by what he sees as the now-fading splendor of Australia's Great
Barrier Reef. His grandfather, celebrated Life magazine photographer
Fritz Goro, took the first underwater photographs of the reef, as well as the
first complete aerial shots, from an RAAF plane in 1950. And in the 1960s,
Goreau's father, also called Tom, revisited the site of an early reef expedition
with legendary British marine scientist Sir Maurice Yonge, who first came to
study the Barrier Reef in the late 1920s. "So I grew up with photographs of the
Barrier Reef which precede those of all Australian reef scientists and which
they are largely unaware of," says Goreau. Most of those Australian experts have
hitherto dismissed Goreau as an alarmist who uses fear to spruik for his Global
Coral Reef Alliance. Late last month, Goreau came to Australia for an
international symposium in Townsville, where he presented his latest evidence of
dramatic threats to reefs everywhere from rising sea temperatures.