Aiding coral reefs in their fight to survive climate change
Climate change is the biggest threat to the future of the Great Barrier Reef. For five years we have been learning what causes stress to coral and applying knowledge gained into coral reef management practices and policy.
The impact of climate change on coral reefs is already being felt. In Australia, the first documented back-to-back coral bleaching events triggered by marine heat waves occurred in 2016-2017, devastating over a third of the Great Barrier Reef. Concurrent with ocean warming, coral reefs are having to contend with other impacts of climate change, such as ocean acidification and deoxygenation. Consequently, the 2019 Reef Outlook report has identified climate change as the biggest threat to the future of the Great Barrier Reef.
The Future Reefs Team at UTS has spent the last five years unlocking the mechanisms that facilitate stress tolerance in corals and applying the knowledge gained from core research into coral reef management practices and policy. For example, identifying areas with high conservation value (e.g. reef systems thriving under natural extremes, climate “refugia”, and source reefs) and developing improved targeted management frameworks.
Our core research is also directly applied to developing more innovative management strategies, for example designing new tools that retrieve diagnostics of coral stress resilience, thereby facilitating “smart decision making”. We implemented the first multi-species coral nursery on the Great Barrier Reef, and develop innovative solutions to maintain and “rebuild” coral biomass – as part of new ‘stewardship’-based management – in close partnership with Great Barrier Reef tour operators to support integrated social-ecological adaptive capacity. Collectively the team’s work aims to provide knowledge and tangible actions that can facilitate reef resilience, urgently required if corals are to survive climate change.
Contact
Associate Professor David Suggett
UTS Climate Change Cluster