At a special media conference held today in Cairns, Australia's lead reef management agency confirmed speculations around another mass coral bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef.

“What’s happened over the last 12 months is that the water temperature simply hasn’t cooled down. The water temperature has been consistently 1 or 2 degrees above average all year" said Col McKenzie CEO of AMPTO, the Association of Marine Park Tourism Operators.

Experts from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority spent six hours yesterday flying over the Reef between Townsville and Cairns, alongside researchers from the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

The aerial survey of the Reef, the first for 2017, found severe bleaching in offshore reefs from north of Ingham to the northern extent of the survey near Cairns.

This year more bleaching is being observed in this central part of the Reef, which last year escaped widespread severe bleaching.

Marine Park Authority Director of Reef Recovery Dr David Wachenfeld said the survey confirmed anecdotal reports from visitors and reef surveys of bleaching from marine park rangers and commercial operators.

"Mass bleaching is occurring on the Great Barrier Reef for the second consecutive year,” he said. “How this event unfolds will depend very much on local weather conditions over the next few weeks.

“Importantly, not all bleached coral will die. As we saw last year bleaching and mortality can be highly variable across the 344,000 square kilometre Marine Park — an area bigger than Italy.”

Mr McKenzie said "We are seeing an enormous amount of heat stress out there and that heat stress is being demonstrated by the coral as either type 2 fluorescing coral or type 3 fully bleached coral.

"Fortunately the fully bleached coral is very patchy, we aren’t seeing big swathes of it like we did last year and so far it doesn’t look anywhere near as bad. Having said that we are the canary in the coal mine for climate change.

"There is no doubt that if we do not get our act together globally we will have serious damage to the barrier reef, we could see the barrier reef lose a huge amount of biodiversity, when you look at the Cayman islands they have about 30 species of coral and we have 300."

"So we have a magnificent biodiverse reef out there and this heat stress will over time start to kill that. What we have to do right across the world is put politics aside - we need to meet the Paris targets!"

"If we can get the coral as resilient as possible by looking at water quality and crown of thorns starfish infestation, if we can do those things there is very good hope that we can save the great barrier reef."

This event is right in the tourism heartland and it’s a 6.4 billion dollar industry employing 63,000 people in the catchment of the great barrier reef.

"It’s time for us to look at anything and everything to protect the great barrier reef – and there are things that we can do, we can be out there dealing more actively with crown of thorns, put a third boat on and make sure the coral left after a bleaching event isn’t being eaten out by crown of thorns."

"I know that both state and federal governments are investing heavily but there is still more that could be done to save this reef.” 

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