Researchers from the University of Western Australia say the WA's waters are an international "sentinel of climate change".
Professor of marine ecology Thomas Wernberg and a team of academics presented their research to the 13th International Symposium of Temperate Reef Systems in Tasmania last week.
Professor Wernberg said WA was of particular interest internationally as a signal for others on both the impacts of marine warming and potential solutions.
"One of the things we study is the impact of climate change on temperate reef communities, and unfortunately Western Australia is an ocean-warming hotspot, so we are sort of a sentinel for effects of climate change really," he said.
"What we're presenting offers an opportunity to look into the future for many regions around the world that are still warming but are a little bit behind us."
Focus on restoration
Conference convenor Craig Johnson from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania said there had been a significant decline in parts of the Great Southern Reef — which extends from Kalbarri, south around Tasmania, and north to the Queensland border — due to climate change.
However, Professor Johnson believed there were "glimmers of hope".
"We learn from those areas of the world that are showing resilience to the sort of environmental change and we learn about adaptation to that change," he said.
"We learn how to restore habitat in some cases.
"There's still plenty of optimism and hope but we shouldn't shy away from the fact that the changes are unprecedented in scale both in time and space."
In 2011 an extreme marine heatwave wiped out swathes of kelp forests that were estimated to underpin tourism and fisheries industries worth $10 billion a year.
"All the modelling suggests there will be another heatwave at some stage; the big question is how long will it be?" Professor Johnson said.
"Will the ecosystems have an opportunity to recover before they get hit by another heatwave?"
The Midwest, which was particularly hard hit, has been the focus of a restoration project.
"Many communities have not recovered yet but over the past couple of years we've worked on restoring kelp forests on many of our reefs and that's one of the things we are presenting at this conference, our successes with this, even if they are still early in the process and comparing it to other places in the world," he said.
"There has been very little recovery of the kelp forest in the northern areas, particularly around Port Gregory and Kalbarri.
"This is where we're now concentrating our restoration efforts because now, this long after the marine heatwave, kelps have not come back naturally so we're trying to give them a little bit of a helping hand."
Future potential
University of Western Australia PhD student Taylor Simpkins' research focuses on kelp forests between Kalbarri and Esperance investigating the potential for kelp forests as a carbon sink.
"Essentially looking at the carbon that's stored and sequestered, or potentially sequestered, through kelp forests that are found all along the Great Southern Reef in southern Australia," she said.
"We're really excited about the potential of these systems as a nature-based solution to climate change."
Ms Simpkins said the aim was to determine how kelp could be helpful and why it should be protected.
"We know that we're facing increased temperatures both on land and in our oceans … so we really want to understand how we can protect some areas of kelp forest that may not be as vulnerable to climate change," she said.
"They may be areas or hotspots of carbon sequestration that are actually helping us as humans moving forward and dealing with excess CO2."
