While the major parties are doing their best to ignore climate change this election – although to be fair, the Coalition are promising to make things a little worse by basically ditching the bare minimum vehicle efficiency standards we have, and also re-assess our bare minimum emissions reduction targets – AAP has a report on how our reef system is, effectively, burning:
Australian corals reefs have been pummelled by unprecedented heat stress up to two times worse than has ever been recorded.
Roughly half of Western Australia’s coastline, including the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Ningaloo, has been enduring a reef-threatening marine heatwave and molecular ecologist Dr Kate Quigley warns higher temperatures are yet to subside.
“The amount of warming so far dwarfs the warming that had previously been seen on places like the Great Barrier Reef, which led to catastrophic bleaching and mortality in 2016 and 2017,” she said.
Providing an update on WA’s troubled reefs at the Indian Ocean Forum in Perth, Minderoo’s principal research scientist said the “underwater bushfire” was causing widespread bleaching.
The ghostly colouring is a recognisable sign of heat stress but corals can recover, though the likelihood of mortality increases the longer temperatures stay elevated.
Dr Quigley said in some extreme cases, corals were skipping the adaptive bleaching response to go “straight to death”.
“Instead of actually bleaching, the tissue just comes off the skeleton,” she said.
The scientist stressed stopping “the disease of climate change” was the answer to the world’s coral reef woes, rather than trying to address the symptoms.
The two-day event hosted by the French Embassy in Australia and the Minderoo Foundation is designed to gather perspectives from the Indian Ocean ahead of the Third United Nations Ocean Conference, to be held in Nice in June.
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