No new funding or climate commitments in Great Barrier Reef update

Queensland's Environment
Minister, Steve Miles.

An Australian government update on what it is doing to protect the wounded Great Barrier Reef includes no new funding and no new commitments to tackle the biggest threat to its health, climate change.

The update to the UNESCO World Heritage Centre says good progress has been made since federal and state governments last year committed to a 35-year plan to improve the reef's health, but it falls short of what scientists believe is necessary.

It follows the release of fresh surveys of coral death due to inflated ocean temperatures last summer. The ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies estimated 67 per cent of coral has died in shallow reefs north of Port Douglas, compared with just 1 per cent mortality south of Mackay.

In a foreword to the report, Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg and his Queensland counterpart Steven Miles say the reef has been severely affected by mass coral bleaching, and that climate change is "the single biggest threat to reefs worldwide - and the Great Barrier Reef is no exception".

Read Adam Morton’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “No new funding or climate commitments in Great Barrier Reef update.”

We will feel the higher temperatures 'where we live'

Regions around the Arctic may have passed a 2°C temperature rise as far back as 2000 and, if emissions rates don't change, areas around the Mediterranean, central Brazil and the contiguous United States could see 2°C of warming by 2030.

This is despite the fact that under a business as usual scenario the world is not expected to see global average temperatures rise by 2°C compared to preindustrial times until the 2040s.

New research published in Nature led by Prof Sonia Seneviratne from ETH Zurich with researchers from Australia's ARC Centre ofExcellence for Climate System Science (ARCCSS) has quantified the change in regional extremes in a world where global average temperatures have risen by 2°C.

Read the Science Daily story - “How a 2°C rise means even higher temperatures where we live.”