Ongoing damage to the health and beauty of the Great Barrier Reef by global warming is inevitable, delivering major blows to local communities and the national economy, according to the Commonwealth’s five-yearly health check of Australia’s world heritage listed coral wonder. Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority chairman Ian Poiner wrote to Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek about the findings in his agency’s outlook report, which states climate change is the ecosystem’s greatest threat due to the rising intensity and frequency of marine heatwaves causing coral bleaching. Coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.
Credit: Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. “The overall future outlook for the Great Barrier Reef is very poor,” Poiner said. The rating for the future of the reef was “very poor” – the lowest possible.
Before the authority’s previous outlook report in 2019, the reef was hit with mass coral bleaching events in 1998, 2002, 2016, 2017. In the five years since then, there were three mass bleaching events – in 2020, 2022 and in the summer of 2024. Loading Poiner said “urgent national and global action” to reduce warming was the only way to limit the escalating effects of climate change.
Bleaching events are now occurring so frequently that corals have less and less time to recover. “It is imperative that everything possible is done to create recovery windows for the reef,” the report said Queensland marine tourism is estimated .