The Climate #7: Requiem for a reef
Our coral reefs and other beautiful and productive coastal marine ecosystems are in peril. Can they be saved?
The mood at the Western Australian Maritime Museum protest last Sunday morning was different. Grief seems the best description. Barely a 100 people of Perth's 2.5 million residents turned out to demonstrate against the hypocrisy of Woodside, a mega fossil fuel extractor, funding the Western Australian Maritime Museum. Woodside plans to drill for gas and lay 800km of gas pipes across our most important coral reef marine parks over the next decade.
Perhaps it isn't hypocrisy. Woodside and the Museum know what is happening. A museum will soon be the only place our kids and future generations will see specimens of our dead and dying coral ecosystems. They are dying much quicker than at least 2,499,900 Perth residents realise. There is no coming back from being cooked for thirty weeks in bath temperature seawater. That last chance to see a pristine coral ecosystem, teeming with sealife I wrote about four years ago is gone.
‘From 1 January 2023 to 10 August 2025, bleaching-level heat stress has impacted 83.9% of the world’s coral reef area and mass coral bleaching has been documented in at least 83 countries and territories.’
Most of us seem insensible to the fact that these ecosystems, once dead, will not be coming back; nor a sense of regret or responsibility for their demise. Our kids and their kids will never see a flourishing coral ecosystem. Coral ecosystems will be a thing of the past; taking their place alongside the thylacine and the dodo. A testament to our collective destructiveness. And because our fossil fuel driven destruction is, if anything, accelerating, it is timely to ask: which ecosystem will we destroy next?
Shark Bay
A strong candidate lies a few hundred kilometres south of Ningaloo, identified as such in 2019. The seagrass beds of Shark Bay that supply us here in the South West of WA with all manner of seafood face ‘catastrophic risk’. A 2011 marine heatwave killed between 70 and 90% of the seagrass. Dugong abundance in the bay area shrank and has not recovered.
A further marine heat wave baking these shallow-water seagrass beds will drive the local dugongs and ancient stromatolites to extinction. Our wild crab, snapper and prawn fisheries will collapse and we will enter the endgame for our coastal marine ecosystems.
Dead zones
A couple of thousand kilometres to the South East of Shark Bay we have a demonstration of the ultimate consequence of our oceans absorbing about 89% of the extra heat due to rising greenhouse gases. That is, absorbing roughly 870,000 Hiroshima bombs worth of heat per day.
A massive algal bloom visible from space, caused by marine heat and high flows of nutrients from the mighty Murray River has killed everything - from the smallest crustaceans to apex predators in South Australia’s Gulf St Vincent and Spencer Gulf over this year’s winter, both of which host vulnerable seagrass and kelp forest habitats. The algal bloom is not expected to dissipate anytime soon. South Australian capital city Adelaide’s beaches are littered with dead and dying sea creatures and the water poisoned with algal toxins, making it unsafe to bathe. The long term impact upon the seagrass and kelp ecosystems remains to be seen.
We know from past global heating episodes associated with mass extinction events, such as the Great Dying 250 million years ago, that our current CO2 levels are already high enough to cause algal blooms to inexorably expand as the oceans warm.
And yes, ocean algal blooms are increasing the world over. We don’t know when our most important tropical and temperate coastal ecosystems and fisheries become dead zones, all but devoid of marine life of any kind. Climate modellers previously hoped it would be a century or two. However, it may only be a few decades before we have knocked out the lot.
Desperate times but no desperate measures
Given the reality of fossil fuel driven ecosystem destruction, the Western Australian Government permitting ongoing fossil fuel extraction, processing and export by Woodside until 2070 is manifestly insane. There is no more road down which to kick the climate can. We are in the era of climate consequences.
The scale of coastal ecosystem loss demands urgent, large scale responses. Humanity has a stunning technical capacity for massive engineering works - think Three Gorges Dam scale and more. It is at this scale marine ecosystem protection is required if we are to preserve at least some coastal marine ecologies and biodiversity until we stabilise our global heating madness and work out what to do next.
No matter which climate metric we track - CO2 in the atmosphere, sea surface temperature, polar or mountain glacial ice sheet mass - we see no let up in both the causes and consequences of human induced global heating. Given current energy policies and fossil fuel consumption trajectories, we are unlikely to see any respite from marine heating for decades to come.
In Conclusion
Most of us are yet to grasp the certainty and grave consequences of coastal marine ecosystem loss. The policy action and the billions of funding needed to conserve even a tiny portion of these complex ecosystems won’t follow until most of us do grasp the peril faced by coral, seagrass and kelp ecosystems. By which time, as is often the case with human induced catastrophes, it may be too late to make a meaningful difference. Expect to hear that worn out adjective ‘unprecedented’ time and time again as the climate consequences of our inaction unfold unabated.
In parallel, without fanfare, the option of engaging with our coastal marine ecosystems will disappear. Worldwide, a food source for at least a third of humanity will fall off the menu. Here in WA, the chance to paddle above and marvel at the glide path of an eagle ray across seagrass beds, snorkel a coral reef or allow our kids to swim and splash at our ocean beaches will be no more. An unutterable tragedy for us all.