The Australian government is undertaking frantic diplomatic efforts to avoid the Great Barrier Reef being listed as “in danger” by the UN, amid rising international concern over the opening up of a vast region in the state of Queensland for gigantic new coal mines.
A draft decision on the reef’s status is expected to be delivered by the end of this month ahead of a meeting of Unesco’s world heritage committee in Bonn, Germany in June. Unesco has already expressed its concern over erosion of the reef, which has lost 50% of its coral cover over the past 30 years.
It has emerged that Australian ministers and diplomats have visited 19 countries that provide committee members, including Portugal, Japan and Jamaica, in recent months in a desperate lobbying effort to avert an internationally embarrassing blacklisting for the ailing reef.
An “in danger” listing for the huge marine ecosystem, the world’s largest living entity, would prove highly problematic to mining companies attempting to open a massive fossil fuel frontier in Queensland’s Galilee basin, an area of underground coal the size of Britain.
Critics insist the Galilee basin projects would devastate global attempts to stay within a carbon ‘budget’ to avoid runaway climate change.
Good grief. Are we really so stupid a species as we seem determined to prove at every opportunity ? When the coral (and all the other multitudinous life it supports) is gone, it is gone. The coal is going nowhere.
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