.... Our reef (the GBR) is probably the best managed reef in the world. We have a comprehensive zoning plan that has No-take zones. Australians love the GBR and Governments, farmers and others have the will and are mostly working to improve water quality.
But the GBR sits on a shallow continental shelf adjacent to a long coastline of the largest island on earth. It has large tracts of agricultural land, population centers and tropical rivers flowing into it. Anything from the land ends up somewhere out on the reef.
In my opinion, before the 1970's we had a rich bottom fauna on the inter-reef areas, a bit like an underwater rainforest, on a soft, sandy-muddy bottom forming a carpet that helped consolidate the sediment. It was largely unseen & unknown because it's not a very "sexy" place to dive or photograph - low visibility without corals and fish. Not great media food.
In losing this consolidating carpet of life, we also lost the filter-feeders such as giant sponges that thrived here were key to trapping suspended sediment that came out of wet season rivers. Unfortunately this "underwater rainforest" was largely destroyed by bottom trawling in the 70's & 80's and wonder whether it has sufficiently recovered to perform its role as a natural filter for coastal runoff & GBR lagoon waters generally. Perhaps this is a fruitful area for research & remediation that would benefit the whole reef system.
In the Pacific, and even in the rich coral areas of Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines, much of the reef is surrounded by deep oceanic water that can largely act as a garbage dump for anything from these islands. Poverty and lack of regulation also means much of these reefs have been stripped of big fish and sharks.
The GBR is big; and it's naturally highly variable. Between north and south; inner and outer reefs; it changes year to year; one reef to the next and then within different zones on a single reef and from one little patch to the next. Even coral colonies of the same species next to each other can be different in their response to heat stress for example.
It's normal for us each to form an opinion from what we see, and what our beliefs are, but it's impossible for anyone to truly know the reef in its entirety. The patchiness of the reef allows opinions of every dimension to be supported with images and anecdotes.
This is why we need the Fact Filter of science to help us get closer to an accurate view of what the reality is. The best we can do is comprehensive sampling to get an overview - which is what the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and AIMS have recently done in their surveys, finding 22% of the total reef has died, 85% of it in the Far North.
Anyone watching the weather over this past summer saw that the far northern reef (north of Lizard Is) was rarely covered in usual wet-season cloud, and the shallow continental shelf waters heated up consistently. No cyclones. No depressions to cool the water.
We do need to manage our climate and work to stop polluting with fossil fuel. To work towards better practices on land and water to improve water quality. But we also need to acknowledge the things we do RIGHT. We manage our reefs remarkably well and we showcase the reef through the eyes of some of the most passionate and well-run reef tourism operations - many with marine biologists on board - in the world. The more people who see it, in all its complex, variable states, the more we become aware as a global society of ensuring that wherever we are, we "tread lightly" in our daily lives.
The reef, and our natural world, is amazingly resilient. We just need to get out of the way of nature.