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View all search resultsThe Great Barrier Reef refuses to die on schedule
Despite decades of media obituaries and rescheduled catastrophes, the Great Barrier Reef just delivered the best five years of coral cover in its 40-year recorded history.
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A diver swims on March 7, 2022, amongst the coral on the Great Barrier Reef, off the coast of the Australian state of Queensland. (AFP/Glenn Nichols)
A
ustralia’s marine scientists recently released their annual audit of the Great Barrier Reef, and it contains news you almost certainly haven’t heard: coral cover held steady or increased across most of the reef.
In the 40 years scientists have systematically measured the reef, the five best years on record are the five most recent. That is the sound of a catastrophe not happening.
You haven’t heard the good news because the reef has an entire public relations industry built around predicting its imminent demise. In 2012, researchers reported that the reef had lost half its coral since the mid-1980s and projected that cover could halve again by 2022. In 2014, the Guardian published an interactive obituary for the reef. In 2016, Outside magazine agreed, declaring the reef dead at age 25 million.
The patient, it turned out, hadn’t read the notices. By 2021, coral cover was higher than at any point since measurements began in 1986. It stayed at unprecedented levels through 2022 and 2023 and climbed to a new all-time high in 2024. The reef answered two decades of death sentences with more coral than anyone had ever measured.
The scientists even stopped publishing the reef-wide statistic, making it harder for the layperson to easily see that the reef was defying predictions. But they continued publishing regional averages, making it possible to effectively recreate their reef-wide average, which clearly kept increasing.
This posed a problem, which the doomsayers solved with a new annual ritual: Report the good number, then smother it in warnings. When coral surged back in 2021, the monitoring institute insisted the outlook remained “very poor”. When 2022 set records, the BBC granted that cover was the highest in 36 years but “highly vulnerable.”
In 2023, with the reef still near record highs, the official report was headlined as a “pause” in recovery. At 2024’s peak, scientists declared the reef one disturbance away from losing it all. The reckoning was always due next year. Next year kept arriving, and so did the coral.
