After millennia of building resilience, challenge after challenge, the Great Barrier Reef has flourished into one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World and an Australian icon.

‘Resilience’ has become an eco-buzzword, and in some cases, used to acquit human impact. ‘Resilience’ can instead place the accountability to survive directly onto our natural environments themselves; Nature’s survival depends not on our actions, but its capacity for resilience.

The current world-class management of the Great Barrier Reef relies heavily on reef resilience, on an unattainable speed of reef adaptation and self-defense against the greatest threat to coral reefs worldwide; climate change.

The first recorded coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef was in the early 1980s, and has increased at scale in frequency and severity since then. In 2022, a mass bleaching event impacted 91% of the Great Barrier Reef, and severe bleaching has now been recorded on coral reefs in every region of the world.

The question is, will we continue with our narrative of resilience, as we permanently lose biodiversity, stand by as fish stocks collapse and corals bleach, contented to farewell this ecosystem?

Are the images we’ve been taking since the 1980s the final eulogy of a dying wonder? Shall we act to ensure the survival of the reef, or is this just a long goodbye?

Coming soon. . .