Economists Say the Great Barrier Reef Is 'Too Big to Fail'

After an extensive six-month study, Deloitte Access Economics has come up with a price tag for the Great Barrier Reef: AU$56 billion. This takes into account the "economic, social and, iconic value" of the reef, including some 64,000 direct and indirect jobs that exist because of it.

In the scheme of Australia's economy, that's significant. The report estimates the reef generates some $6.4 billion every year, with $3.9 billion of this going directly into the state of Queensland.

"This report sends a clear message that the Great Barrier Reef—as an ecosystem, as an economic driver, as a global treasure—is too big to fail," said Steve Sargent, director of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, which commissioned the report.

But the Great Barrier Reef is failing.

Aerial surveys by James Cook University professor Terry Hughes have shown back-to-back mass bleaching events have decimated the northern reef. "In the north, I saw hundreds of reefs—literally two-thirds of the reefs were dying and are now dead," Hughes said back in March. There's also evidence that 2017's bleaching has started to affect the middle reef as well.

These bleaching events happen when the coral gets stressed, expelling the algae that gives the reef its colour. While water quality, land management, and overfishing do put stress on the reef, the biggest driver is irrefutably climate change. In 2017, Hughes and scores of others reef scientists published a study directly linking the reef bleaching to global warming.

"The Great Barrier Reef is the canary in the coal mine for climate change," Basha Stasak from the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) told VICE. But Australia's Reef 2050 plan largely ignores the issue of climate change. And environmental groups, such as ACF, have serious concerns about the government pushing ahead with coal mining throughout the region, especially in Queensland's Galilee Basin—just inland from the Great Barrier Reef.

"The choice we really face now is that we cannot have a healthy reef and coal… If we keep burning coal, the bleaching will continue," Stasak said. "Our politicians are choosing coal… [and] the Adani coal mine has really become a symbol of this."

The first major project in the Galilee Basin, Indian power giant Adani's Carmichael coal mine will not only be Australia's largest coal mine, but also the biggest in the southern hemisphere. Climate groups argue the Carmichael will singlehandedly burn through the world's remaining carbon budget—the level of emissions that could keep global warming below two degrees and avoid the kind of catastrophic climate change that would completely destroy the reef.

But the Carmichael is also just the beginning: there are nine mega-mines proposed for the Galilee Basin. As Anna Krien noted in her recent Quarterly Essay about the reef, "at full production, the Galilee Basin is expected to double Australia's exports to more than 600 million tonnes a year." This would make Australia the largest coal exporter in the world.

However, governments at both a state and federal level strongly support Adani's plans. Australia has pledged to chip $1 billion into the project. Visiting India earlier this year, Malcolm Turnbull even told Adani's CEO and other executives that native title laws will be "fixed" to stop legal challenges by the land's traditional owners—the Wangan and Jagalingou peoples on the site of the Carmichael, and the Juru people at Abbot Point, the port where Adani plan's to ship its coal haul from.

The economic argument for the Carmichael coal mine is that it would raise some $22 billion through revenue and taxes, and generate 10,000 jobs. In nearby areas such as Townsville, where unemployment is pushing 10.7 percent, this is appealing. However, Adani's own expert, Jerome Fahrer, told Queensland's Land Court that, realistically, the figures would be much lower—probably only around 2,400 at the peak of the mine's construction. And, as Basha Stasak points out, these estimates don't take into account the 64,000 jobs on the reef that would be threatened.

"[Deloitte's] report is really just confirming what we've always known, which is that the reef brings incredible value to the Australia and the world not just in terms of the life it supports… but also in terms of the jobs it brings to the Australian economy," Stasak says. "The mining industry is in structural decline, at some point it'll end… the reef could provide jobs and economic boost for as long as we're willing to support it."

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