The Great Barrier Reef is, of course, dying – a victim of humans’ hubris and callousness towards the natural world. We know this because we keep being told this is the case. This week, the New York Times carried the headline: ‘Heat Raises Fears of Demise for Great Barrier Reef Within a Generation’. This story, echoed elsewhere, was based on a paper in Nature claiming that the seas around the reef, off the eastern coast of Queensland, are at their warmest in at least 400 years. ‘Highest ocean heat in four centuries places Great Barrier Reef in danger,’ asserted the authors of the study, led by the University of Wollongong in Australia’s New South Wales.
It echoes what happened two years ago, amid similar warnings about the health of the Great Barrier Reef
There is just the one problem: annual data on the reef itself, published by the Australian Institute of Marine Sciences on the same day, appears to show a more positive story – and one that wasn’t as widely reported. Average hard coral cover – the most common metric to measure the health of the reef – increased in all three sections of the reef. Indeed, in the Northern and Central sections it is at its highest in the 38 years in which annual monitoring has taken place. In the Southern section it is very nearly at its highest. The report notes that some of the data was collected before a mass bleaching event (when algae disappear from parts of the reef). However, there have been other bleaching events in the past, from which the reef has recovered.
This is becoming a bit of a trend. It echoes what happened two years ago, amid similar warnings about the health of the Great Barrier Reef – before coral cover recovered to what was then its highest-recorded level. The Institute of Marine Sciences notes that parts of the reef, while not dead, are under stress. Nevertheless, this week’s headlines are yet one more example of how doom-mongering in the world of conservation so often fails to tell the whole story. There is a default position in so much of what is published on the subject: that things are bad, are getting worse and that it is all our fault. This narrative will be imposed no matter what the underlying data show. When ‘endangered’ plants and animals subsequently proliferate, the resulting coverage is rather muted – just look at how the badger cull was opposed by people who wrongly seemed to think it was a case of the last few members of the species being driven from Britain. Yet there are still thought to be huge numbers of badgers in Britain in spite of the cull.
This is not to say, of course, that there are not some animals and plants which are in genuine danger of extinction, nor that efforts shouldn’t be made to ensure that the Great Barrier Reef does not degrade – that is why the annual monitoring began. But why can’t we be told the full story when it comes to how the natural world is doing? If we keep being told that something is dying when it doesn’t appear to be, it ends up being counter-productive – it will lose public attention. Trouble is that bad news sells.
When tabloids over-egg a news story to sell their papers we call it ‘sensationalism’. Yet the coverage of research put out by learned journals and university departments can play the same game: emphasise the negative and suppress the positive. If a healthy Great Barrier Reef is still with us in 30 years’ time they will end up looking somewhat foolish.
Comments
Comment section temporarily unavailable for maintenance.