Morrison Moving Heaven & Earth To Block UNESCO Change - As Opposed To, Y'know, Protecting The Reef
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Alongside the government’s aggressive response to the prospect of an “in danger” listing, Unesco’s recommendation sparked an exchange of letters between the prime minister, Scott Morrison, and the office of the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk. The letters reveal that on Wednesday Queensland rebuffed a request from Morrison to immediately sign off on a new version of the centrepiece joint reef policy.
In Paris, the Australian government’s ambassador to Unesco, Megan Anderson, had been sending a summary of the draft of that new policy to committee members. Conservationists aware of the content say in its current form it does not go far enough to either improve water quality or lock in commitments for Australia to cut emissions in line with a rise in global temperatures to 1.5C – a level Unesco has asked for.
Anderson also sent committee members a draft of the Australian Institute of Marine Science’s latest annual monitoring report on the state of corals across the reef. She said it showed “widespread recovery was underway”. The report also said the increase in coral coverage since the 2020 bleaching event was dominated by fast-growing species susceptible to storms and coral-eating starfish, and would be the first to go in the next bleaching event. “The predicted consequences of climate change, which include more frequent and intense mass coral bleaching events, are now a contemporary reality,” the report said.
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But Prof Morrison believes there’s another unstated reason for Australia’s hardcore lobbying. “If the reef goes on the ‘in danger’ list, the social licence for the government to approve more fossil fuel extraction falls over. This is not about tourism. This is about the social licence,” she says. Australia’s lobbying effort, she says, has now set up a test of the world heritage committee’s integrity. “This is pivotal. Do [the committee members] hold up the intentions of the convention [to protect the world’s heritage] or do they allow that to be undermined?”
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/23/whether-or-not-the-great-barrier-reef-is-listed-as-in-danger-wont-alter-the-fact-it-is-at-risk-from-climate-change
