Opinion: I'm 12, And I Don't Understand Why Adults Vote To Destroy The Planet

My name is Clem. I am twelve years old and I live in a small town in Far North Queensland, Australia. Where I live is so beautiful and so precious. It is the home of the largest living structure on Earth - the Great Barrier Reef. Vast mountains surround me and there is bright red dirt under my feet. It is almost always lovely and quiet here. All I can hear is the distant chirping of birds and the rustle of leaves. And that’s how I like it.

Australia's Great Barrier Reef, the world's largest living
 structure, is dying amid rising sea temperatures.

We had an election in Australia last weekend, and it did not go well. I feel angry and disappointed, because our government doesn’t take the climate emergency seriously. We don’t have a vote, but school students like me have been going on strike and working so incredibly hard to get them to listen.

Read the Buzzfeed story - “Opinion: I'm 12, And I Don't Understand Why Adults Vote To Destroy The Planet.”

Plan to pump cold water on to Barrier Reef to stop bleaching labelled ‘band-aid’

The plan, proposed by the tourism industry and the Reef and Rainforest Research Centre, seeks to protect six reefs with high economic or environmental value near Cairns and Port Douglas.

Mass bleaching is occurring on the reef
 for the second consecutive year,
the marine park authority says. 

A proposal to use $9m to pump cold water on to the Great Barrier Reef’s tourist hotspots to stave off coral bleaching has been described as a “band-aid” solution, which does little to address the fundamental threats to the world’s largest living structure. 

It would involve using low-energy technology to push adjacent cold water from a depth of about 40 metres to the surface. The aim is to use the cooler waters to alleviate bleaching, which is caused by global warming-induced rises in sea surface temperatures.

Read Christopher Knaus’s story in The Guardian - “Plan to pump cold water on to Barrier Reef to stop bleaching labelled ‘band-aid’."

'Clock is ticking' for Great Barrier Reef - Sunshine Coast magazine

A world without the Great Barrier Reef – it’s an alarming concept.

"My Weekly Preview" - a free magazine
circulating on the Sunshine Coast directly
addresses damage to the Great Barrier Reef.

This wonder, as we know it, has changed forever, and if current scientific predictions are correct, much of it could be dead within 20 years.

Earlier this year, news broke that the billion-dollar tourist attraction, which covers an area of 344,400 square kilometres (a bit bigger than Italy) and is home to an array of marine life including 1600 species of fish and six of the world’s seven marine turtle species, has experienced its third mass coral bleaching episode in the past 18 years.

News of the coral carnage made headlines around the world.

The National Coral Bleaching Taskforce – a collaboration of scientists from across the nation – reports that 93 per cent of the reef, which dates back 500,000 years and is the largest living structure on earth, has been affected.

Read Candice Holznagel‘s story in My Weekly Preview - “The clock is ticking on climate change – but have we left our run too late?”