“Scientists are very aware of ecological grief,” said Terry Hughes, one of Australia’s leading coral scientists, in early 2016.
Their fluency in this anthropogenic phenomenon, he went on to explain, owed to their role in chronicling the profound demise of the world’s species and their ecosystems.
At the time, Hughes’ remarks were made against the backdrop of devastation visited on the Great Barrier Reef by a mass bleaching event — the third in the space of two decades.
He said that after he showed the results of the aerial surveys to his students, “we wept”.
In the six years since, global heating has given rise to three further mass bleaching events, with the latest in 2022 being the first to occur during the Pacific Ocean’s cooler La Niña phase.
In the result, scientists fear the reef has now been reduced to little more than a “graveyard” — an enduring monument to both human excess and failure.
Despite this, however, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek has as recently as the weekend rejected renewed pressure from UNESCO to list the reef as endangered.
“I don’t want to see Australia singled out,” she said in an echo of the former Morrison government.
“I’ll be advocating for Australia’s best interests in any international discussions, and it’s in Australia’s best interests that the Great Barrier Reef is not listed as endangered.”
An endangered listing could limit certain development activities within the vicinity of the reef that lack the prior approval of the World Heritage Committee, which some say could impact tourism and trade.
Speaking to Crikey, Glenn Walker of Greenpeace Australia Pacific said Plibersek’s stance was emblematic of the government’s wider disinclination to recognise the extinction crisis and climate change as inextricably linked.
“It’s undeniable climate change is having an enormous impact on Australia’s environment and our national treasures like the Great Barrier Reef, which the community very clearly wants to protect,” he said.
“The fossil fuel and [extractive] industries need to be right down the bottom of the list so far as who the interest groups are with our environmental protection legislation — we feel very strongly about that as I’m sure most Australians do.”
Walker’s remarks were made within the context of the government’s Nature Positive Plan, a 60-page blueprint released on Thursday to reform the nation’s broken environment laws and guard against further ecological decline.
Though environmental groups have generally accepted the plan as a “step in the right direction”, many have identified its failure to include a climate change trigger as approximating to a new frontier of climate denialism in Australia. The denialism, on this view, lies in the government’s resistance to the reality the climate and extinction crises are, to a significant extent, two sides of the same coin.
“You simply can’t have national environmental legislation which doesn’t fully recognise the impact of climate change on the environment,” Walker said, referencing the Great Barrier Reef as an example.
“Australia is a massive contributor to climate change through the extraction of coal and gas and shipping that off overseas where it is burnt — and that needs to be factored into decision-making [for new projects].”
It was a sentiment shared by the Climate Council and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), with the former describing the absence of a climate trigger as “incongruous” and the latter as “a wholesale disservice to the context that we’re in”.
Australian Conservation Foundation chief executive Kelly O’Shanassy, for her part, says the “deeply disappointing” omission would allow the “climate impacts of coal and gas projects to continue to be ignored”.
It’s against this backdrop that Plibersek will travel to Montreal on Wednesday for the COP 15 biodiversity summit, where she’s expected to push for a new global biodiversity framework focused on preventing any new extinctions.
WWF’s Rachel Lowry said Plibersek’s extinction ambitions were, on any view, welcome, but hung a question mark over their likelihood of success if climate change failed to figure prominently in Australia’s new environmental laws.
“We’re starting to see the right commitments or rhetoric, but without serious resource mobilisation and by ignoring climate change’s impact [on biodiversity], we’re still significantly under-prioritising the environment,” she said.
With some eight million species heading for extinction, scientists say the “fate of the living world” has reached a crossroads.
And among the only things guaranteed by yet another decade of failure, they add, is a pandemic of ecologic grief unconfined to those scientists who chronicle nature’s death.
