Australia’s foremost coral reef scientist Professor Terry Hughes says government plans to restore the Great Barrier Reef are doomed to failure because they’re too small and expensive, while the rate of catastrophic bleaching events are already recurring faster than corals can recover.
A recent Australian Academy of Sciences report said that if the world warmed by 2 degrees Celsius just one per cent of corals would survive. The earth has already warmed by 1.1 degrees and medium-range estimates forecast 1.5 degrees of warming by 2045 to 2050.
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The Australian government has committed NZ$108 million for reef restoration projects which include cooling the water, sun shields and ‘coral gardening’.