Using experimental “cloud brightening” technology and introducing heat-tolerant corals could help slow the Great Barrier Reef’s climate change-fuelled decline by up to 20 years, Australian scientists said Thursday.
The reef faces “precipitous declines” in coral cowl over the following 5 many years as a result of “intense strain” from climate change, a study published in the peer-reviewed journal Royal Society Open Science said.
Climate change is causing marine heatwaves, more intense cyclones and flooding — all of which are damaging the health of the reef.
“Coral reefs are some of the most climate-vulnerable ecosystems on Earth,” lead writer Scott Condie instructed AFP.
“The mannequin projections recommend that coral cowl on the Great Barrier Reef might fall beneath 10 % inside 20 years.”
But ambitious human interventions combined with “strong global climate action” might gradual the speed of decline, stated Condie, a senior analysis scientist on the authorities’s science company CSIRO.
The Great Barrier Reef has already suffered three mass coral bleaching occasions in 5 years and misplaced half its corals since 1995 as ocean temperatures have climbed, in accordance with separate analysis.
Condie and his co-authors modelled the potential impression of interventions equivalent to “cloud brightening”, which was first trialled by scientists on the reef last year.
The technology sends salt crystals into the air, making clouds reflect more sunlight to cool waters around the reef.
They also modelled expanded measures to control the predatory crown-of-thorns starfish, which consume the corals and proliferate when bleaching forces bigger fish to leave an area.
“The results suggest that combinations of interventions may delay decline of the Great Barrier Reef by two decades or more,” Condie stated.
He stated there was “clear urgency” to act but acknowledged that the scale of the work required was “much larger than anything that has previously been deployed on coral reefs”.
“Any large-scale interventions would require a significant monetary funding and have to be acceptable to native communities,” he added.
The modelling assumes global temperatures will not rise beyond 1.8 degrees Celsius by 2100, which would require governments to follow through on their Paris climate agreement pledges.
Australia’s government — which has resisted calls to commit to a target of net zero emissions by 2050 — has downgraded the reef’s long-term outlook to “very poor”.
Aside from its inestimable pure, scientific and environmental worth, the two,300-kilometre-long (1,400-mile-long) reef was value an estimated $4 billion a yr in tourism income for the Australian economic system earlier than the coronavirus pandemic.
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