“Many of us were hoping for that decision to be made to draw even more international attention, both to the plight of the reef and to the Australian government’s failure to have decent climate policy,” says Lesley Hughes, a professor of biology at Sydney’s Macquarie University and a member of the Climate Council. The delay has been decried by some environmentalists and scientists, who have been warning of the danger that climate change poses to the reef for years. On July 23, the 21-country World Heritage Committee agreed to delay the decision, and instead asked Australia to deliver a report on the state of the reef in Feb. “The whole world needs to know there’s a site that’s under threat and we all have a duty to preserve for generations to come.”įollowing UNESCO’s notice, Ley embarked on an 8-day lobbying trip to Europe, where she met representatives of 18 countries and won her government a reprieve. “It is really a call for action,” Mechtild Rössler, director of UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre in Paris, told media during an online briefing. Read More: Australia Is Investing $379 Million in an Effort to Save the Great Barrier Reefĭays later, UNESCO defended its announcement. She noted an investment of $3 billion Australian dollars (about $2.2 billion U.S. “This draft recommendation has been made without examining the reef first hand, and without the latest information,” Sussan Ley, Australia’s minister for the environment, said in a June 22 statement.
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