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I was accused of 'disinformation' when I reported on this earlier
Massive
port projects threaten integrity of Great Barrier Reef
‘The
government is putting the interests of foreign mining companies ahead
of the protection of our reef’
Time,
23
September, 2013
A
dead cat in the in-tray. That’s what Greenpeace called the newly
elected Australian government’s inheritance of a proposal to build
the largest coal port in the world at Abbot Point in the northeastern
state of Queensland. A decision is required, and the stakes couldn’t
be any higher.
On
one side lies the opportunity to efficiently exploit nine proposed
megamines in the Galilee Basin and the thousands of jobs and billions
of export dollars that entails. On the other lies the integrity of
the World Heritage–listed Great Barrier Reef — a series of 3,000
individual reef systems that collectively rank as the largest, most
complex and diverse mass of living organisms on earth.
Such
is the risk posed to the ecosystem by Abbot Point and 17 other
proposed ports on the Queensland coast that the U.N.’s scientific
body UNESCO is mulling the idea of placing the Great Barrier Reef on
its World Heritage in-danger list. There, it would join Florida’s
Everglades National Park, Syria’s bombed ancient city of Aleppo and
42 other heritage-listed sites threatened by war, natural disasters
or unchecked development.
“To
have one of the seven natural wonders of the world appear on that
list would be a massive international embarrassment and shame,”
Greens Senator Larissa Waters tells TIME. “Most people I speak to
on the street can’t believe the government is putting the interests
of foreign mining companies ahead of the protection of our reef.”
According
to the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the Great Barrier Reef
has lost half its coral cover since 1986. Fifty percent of that loss
is attributable to storm damage while the other half has been eaten
by crown-of-thorn starfish, formidable echinoderms covered in
venomous spines that can each consume up to 6 sq m of coral a year.
It’s
against this backdrop that UNESCO is questioning whether the huge
dredging activities associated with the construction of new deep-sea
ports will prove to be the straw that breaks the Great Barrier Reef’s
back. In 2011, Australia failed to notify the World Heritage
Committee about a port-expansion project at Curtis Island, 635 km
south of Abbot Point, where 21 million cubic meters of sand and mud
were dredged and dumped on the ocean floor. A team of UNESCO
investigators that visited the site last year found water quality had
declined and put the Queensland government on notice, telling it that
remedial measures would have to be undertaken to prevent the area
being listed as endangered. That follows the discovery by the
Gladstone Fishing Research Fund of algal blooms and acidity
variations in the water, major outbreaks of diseases in turtles,
dolphins and dugongs (sea cows), and above-average metal counts in
the blood of fish.
The
environmental footprint of the proposed expansion at Abbot Point is
significantly smaller than the one at Curtis Island; only 3 million
cubic meters need to be dredged. The state-owned port operator, North
Queensland Bulk Ports Corp. (NQBP), has also been talking with
commercial fishermen to find the best place to dump the spoil. So
far, though, they’ve failed to reach a consensus. The fishermen say
anywhere the sludge is dumped will negatively impact water quality
and fish stocks — sentiments that are shared by tourism operators
at the nearby Whitsunday Islands, a sun-kissed archipelago that’s
the jewel on the crown of Queensland’s $5 billion tourism sector.
“The
people working on boats here have all seen the loss of coral and
decreased water quality,” says Keith Roberts of Whitsunday
Catamarans, one of the 61,000 people who make a living showcasing the
Great Barrier Reef’s 600 types of coral, 1,625 fish species, 3,000
types of mollusk and 1,500 varieties of sponge to tourists. “Now
they want to dump 3 million cubic meters of sludge on sea-grass beds
where dugongs live. We feel very let down by the government.”
Roberts
also highlights the perils of having hundreds more coal ships passing
through the Great Barrier Reef every year “muddying up shallow
waters with very large propellers and smashing into reefs like that
Chinese vessel,” he says in reference to Shen Neng 1, a Chinese
cargo ship that ran aground near Keppel Bay Islands National Park in
2010, releasing 4 tons of fuel into the water and destroying 3 km of
coral reefs.
NQBP
spokeswoman Mary Steele claims it’s “offensive when groups claim
they have exclusive rights over the well-being of the Great Barrier
Reef.” In the past 21 years, she maintains the company has carried
out 19 separate dredging operations without incident in the area, and
in each case the predicted impacts were greater than the actual
impacts.
“Six
of Australia’s most important ports have been operating and
expanding along the Great Barrier Reef for over 50 years and only
invested millions of dollars in environmental management,” Steel
says. “I would like to know what these groups that criticize us
have invested.”
Adds
Tony Doyle, a real estate agent in the nearby town of Bowen: “I’ve
lived here all my life, and I’ve been fishing here all my life. But
I’ve never seen any kind of negative impact from dredging. I was
out on a boat last weekend, and the fish were practically jumping out
of the water.”
Acting
Queensland Premier Jeff Seeney tells TIME that “alarmist claims
have been made about the Great Barrier Reef for years.” He says his
government “is committed to achieving world’s best practice [and
has] significantly scaled back the original expansion proposal for
Abbot Point,” adding that the decision is now in the hands of the
new federal government.
At
the time of writing, that decision is looking more and more like a
simple rubber stamp. Since winning the Sept. 8 general election on
the wave of a probusiness, promining sentiment, newly minted Prime
Minister Tony Abbott has announced the scrapping of the Climate
Commission, the Climate Change Authority and the carbon tax. That
news was ill-received on the Whitsundays this weekend, where British
national Ben Southall, winner of the famous 2009 Best Job in the
World competition and now a resident of Queensland, was filming
marine life for the state’s tourism authority.
“It’s
a fine balance between supporting the Australian economy and looking
after the long-term health of the Great Barrier Reef,” Southall
says. “But we have an amazing World Heritage site right now, and if
we don’t do everything we can to protect it, it may not be around
for me to show it to my grandchildren.”
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