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Why Is It Important To Protect The Great Barrier Reef – Despite the proximity of the ocean floor and its essential role in human survival, we have mapped less of its topography than the surface of Mars.
For Mick Baron, Tasmania’s giant kelp forests were a playground, a school and a church. The former marine biologist runs a dive center on the east coast of the Australian island and waxes rhapsodic about the wonders of dense kelp habitats. “Algae diving is one of the most amazing underwater experiences you can have,” says the 65-year-old, likening it to flying through the canopy of a terrestrial rainforest. “You won’t find a single empty patch in a kelp forest. . . . From the sponge gardens on the sea floor to the leaves on the surface, it’s teeming with life.”
Why Is It Important To Protect The Great Barrier Reef
Or rather, it was. In late 2015, a marine heat wave hit eastern Australia, wiping out a third of the Great Barrier Reef and the kelp forests that Baron had been exploring for most of his life. “We were diving into a beautiful thick forest in December,” says Baron. “By the end of March, it looked like an asphalt driveway.” Recurring heat waves prevented algae and corals from recovering; sea temperatures off Australia’s east coast are on average 2°C higher than they were a century ago, an increase scientists attribute to increased greenhouse gas emissions. “The ocean is deceptively fragile,” says Baron. “Two degrees doesn’t seem like much, but not many species can withstand that kind of temperature change.”
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Baron, a gregarious, bearded, sunburnt Australian, has introduced generations of divers to Tasmania’s kelp cathedrals. His own grandchildren, he says, will have to learn about them from their YouTube videos. Almost 95% of eastern Tasmania’s kelp forests are gone, a preview of what’s to come for the ocean as a whole. “Tasmania’s kelp forests are the poster child for what climate change means for our oceans,” he says. “What’s happening here is what will happen everywhere in a decade or two.”
The human being owes his life to the sea. Four out of 10 humans depend on the ocean for food. Marine life produces 70% of our oxygen; 90% of the world’s goods travel by shipping routes. We turn to the sea for solace (ocean-based tourism in the United States alone is worth $124 billion a year) and medical advancement. An enzyme used for testing for COVID-19 originally came from bacteria found in hydrothermal vents in the ocean. The ocean also acts as a giant planetary air conditioner. Over the past century, the ocean has absorbed 93% of the heat trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gas emissions. “If all that heat wasn’t absorbed by the ocean, we’d all be living in Death Valley conditions right now,” says marine conservation biologist Callum Roberts of the University of York in the UK.
But humans have also been squeezing the life of the sea. Rising levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere have made the ocean more acidic, threatening food chains. Warming waters are not only killing marine life, they are also changing currents and affecting global weather patterns. Meanwhile, we dump 8 million tons of waste into the ocean every year, in addition to the agricultural and industrial runoff that poisons coastal areas. At the rate we are harvesting fish, by 2050 there will likely be more plastic than fish in the oceans. A 2019 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that without “profound economic and institutional transformations”, there would be irreversible damage to the oceans and sea ice.
This should be the year those transformations began. A series of international policy meetings in 2020 aimed to set global targets for managing fish stocks, restoring biodiversity and controlling pollution. As with so much this year, the coronavirus pandemic put those talks on hold. However, environmentalists, scientists, policymakers and ocean advocates are working desperately to keep the momentum going, aware that this could be their last and best chance to turn the tide. “What’s the phrase? Never let a good crisis go to waste? As we restart the economy, this is an opportunity to reset our goals for a healthy ocean,” says Carlos M. Duarte, a Spanish marine biologist at the University of Science and Technology King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia. “We have a very narrow window of opportunity in which we can still be effective. In twenty years, it will be too late.”
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Vibrant coral off the coast of Papua New Guinea, notable for its extraordinary coral reef biodiversity.
Duarte and Roberts co-authored a new study published in the journal Nature that provides a model of how the ocean could be restored within a generation. The proposed measures would cost billions of dollars a year, but the return on investment would be 10 seconds more in increased biodiversity, fish stocks, jobs and tourism revenue, Roberts says. “We’ve seen time and time again that if given a chance, ocean life can come back. We just have to be willing to give it the cure.”
A revitalized ocean would not only feed a growing population, but could also strengthen our fight against climate change. Coastal habitats such as mangroves and marshes are extraordinary carbon sinks, capturing as much CO₂ per hectare as 16 acres of pristine Amazon rainforest. New developments in offshore wind farm technology can provide an inexhaustible supply of green energy, while mineral deposits on the seabed, if mined sustainably, provide the raw materials for batteries to store. “It’s to stop thinking of the ocean as a victim of climate change and start thinking of it as a powerful part of the solution,” says Jane Lubchenco, a marine ecologist who served as head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under President Barack Obama.
As the coronavirus pandemic forced the global economy into a state of suspended animation, carbon emissions fell, shipping idled and fisheries closed. The ocean was allowed to breathe for a moment. The hiatus was short-lived, of course, and the economic cost potentially catastrophic. But, like the previously unimaginable sight of blue skies above industrial areas, it offered a reminder that change is within our reach. “The coronavirus crisis has shown us that when there is a threat to the world’s population, there is a will to act collectively to limit that threat,” says Roberts. The harsh lessons of COVID-19 may yet translate into a stronger understanding of the interconnectedness of our personal and planetary health and a demand for action.
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The stakes for ocean health have never been higher. Dying algae and disappearing coral reefs should sound an urgent alarm, says Christopher Trisos, a senior researcher at the African Climate and Development Initiative at the University of Cape Town who focuses on the intersection of climate change, biodiversity and well-being human being “Biodiversity loss from climate change looks like a trickle right now, but it could turn into a flood very quickly,” he says. Even larger “catastrophic die-offs of several species” could begin within the decade, Trisos predicts, starting in tropical oceans and spreading to tropical forests and temperate ecosystems by the 2050s.
Coastal nations would be the first and most affected, with devastating consequences for the billions of people who depend on these ecosystems for sustenance and nutrition. “We fish on coral reefs. We depend on ecotourism. We depend on healthy [kelp] forests for carbon storage and water filtration,” says Trisos. “If there is a sudden collapse of these ecosystems in a single decade, we could lose these services. Revenue is at risk. Food security is at risk.”
But there are ways to preserve the ecosystems that many nations depend on. Hispanic American marine ecologist and conservationist Enric Sala has spent the past 12 years researching and documenting the ocean’s last wild areas as a National Geographic Explorer in Residence. Through its Pristine Seas project, it has called on governments to set aside 5.7 million square kilometers of coastline and ocean as marine parks where fishing, dumping, mining and other destructive industries are prohibited. The results, he says, were surprising. Even in a short period, he saw depleted fish stocks multiply sixfold, algae blooms and coral reefs flourish. Given the chance, he says, the ocean has an extraordinary capacity for regeneration. “I have seen miracles in the water. The ocean sends us a very clear message: if you give me space, see what I can do”.
So far, says Sala, only 2.5% of the ocean enjoys the full protection it needs to do so. He supported a global call to set aside a third of the ocean in similar protected areas by 2030. These marine protected areas are not just about turning back the clock. They are a bulwark against future stresses, a sort of immune booster for the sea that allows it to deal with threats such as acidification and plastic pollution. “Not only is it necessary from the perspective of trying to undo some of the damage we’ve done to the ocean,” says Roberts, “but it’s absolutely vital that
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