Coral Loss: Bad News versus Hope of Technological Solution

Coral Loss: Bad News versus Hope of Technological Solution. Research by Dr. Tara Clark reported (using new techniques to study historical changes in coral) that extensive bleaching oc coral reefs in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef had already occurred prior to the 2016 major bleaching occurrence. Moreover, she said that there was “little evidence of recovery even 60 years after the bleaching” at some of the sites. Her policy conclusions are that “robust management action to reduce human impacts on reefs, especially efforts to reduce sediment and nutrient delivery to reef waters, in order to buy time for the reefs to recover before the next major disturbance event.” Her announcement almost coincided with a report that another Australian professor, Peter Harrison, who has studied coral reproduction, has been able to “grow millions of coral larvae in tanks” and employ them to restore reef in “blast-damaged” Philippine areas. He says that the corals grew fast enough to “reproduce themselves after 3 years” and that he believes that the method can be “scaled” to be used on a large scale in contrast to the “coral gardening technique” currently used which is hard to scale and often unsuccessful.  The juxtaposition of these two reports remind me of my concluding chapter in my Wildlife Politics book where I discuss the debate between “new” and traditional conservationists—the new conservationists view technology as able to solve environmental problems and thus are optimistic while traditional conservationists are skeptical of technological solutions, emphasizing more the preservation of more areas. The article on Tara Clark is at https://phys.org/news/2017-09-coral-loss-palm-islands-mass.html and the one on Harrison is available at: http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2017/09/11/ivf-coral-could-be-game-changer-reef-health
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