Rebuilding Australia’s Coral Reefs

Hello and welcome to UTS Science in Focus, a free public lecture series that showcases the latest research from prominent UTS scientists and researchers. I'm Dr Lucy Buxton and I have the pleasure of being the moderator for today's session. Today is World Science Day, an annual event that's celebrated around the globe that highlights the significant role of science in society and the need to engage in wider public debates on emerging scientific issues. It also underscores the role scientists play in broadening our understanding of the remarkable fragile planet we call home. Coral reefs are among some of the world's most important ecosystems, providing natural habitat for millions of species, protecting our coastal cities and adding millions of dollars into our global economy. But coral reefs are at risk from climate change, environmental stress and other factors. Even if we could abate climate change and reduce ocean warming tomorrow, many stakeholders want to rebuild what has already been lost. There may not be a silver bullet, but reef restoration is an important aid, and the innovations being produced today are bringing down the cost and increasing scale daily. There's considerable effort around the world to protect and restore coral reefs and support the communities that rely on them. Protecting the reefs brings together diverse stakeholders and experts from science, business, industry and community. Today, we're joined by four fantastic speakers to explore their perspectives from across science and economics and community on the restoration practices that are being developed and the positive impact it's having right now to protect these incredible ecosystems. Before I introduce the speakers today, I'd like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation upon whose ancestral lands our city campus now stands.

I'd also like to pay respect to elders past and present, acknowledging them as traditional custodians of knowledge on this land. Just a little bit of housekeeping before we get started. With this being an online event, do bear with us if we have any technical issues, we'll work to resolve them as quickly as possible. If you find at any stage you're not able to talk, to access the talk at any point, please try logging out and logging back in again. If you have any questions during today's panel, we encourage you to type those into the Q&A box in your Zoom control panel and we'll do our best to answer those at the end of the talk. If you like a question someone else has asked and would like it to be answered, please use the upvoting tool, which is the little thumbs up symbol next to the question itself. This session will be recorded, but we will not be recording any video or audio input from the audience. You may contact UTS at science.future@uts.edu.au to discuss any concerns or questions you may have. Ok, so onto today's speakers, our first speaker today is Professor David Suchet. Dave is a highly cited marine biologist interested in understanding how coral and how environments and climate shape the form and function of coral reef ecosystems. Professor in the Climate Change Cluster at UTS, Dave increasingly works alongside industry and tourism sectors to improve reef management and practices and, his work was recognised in 2020 with a UTS Medal for research impact.

Following Dave, we'll hear from Dr Emma Kamp. Emma is an award-winning and internationally renowned coral expert who is passionate about both the protection of coral reefs and the involvement of women and girls in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. We'll, then hear from Mel Edwards. Mel is the director of the Executive MBA program at the UTS Business School and also the research director at the Centre for Business and Sustainable Development. She researches and teaches about sustainability, sustainable enterprise and responsible management, as well as complexity theory and social impact. Her work draws across disciplines with an overarching aim to understand how people organize, learn and adapt to enable sustainable transitions. Our fourth speaker today is Jonny Gaskill with an early career focus in marine life education, Jonny completed not one but two bachelor's degrees in marine science and education, leading to the publication of a number of books and digital resources. In more recent years, Jonny shifted his focus to the protection of coral reefs while working and living in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Applying his knowledge of coral reefs throughout the Great Barrier Reef, he's then co-ordinated a number of local reef recovery initiatives and aims to use his observations to determine the best possible actions that will be needed to be taken to help preserve coral in the Whitsundays. I'll now hand over to our first speaker, Professor David Target.

Thank you, Lucy. It gives me great pleasure to initiate this series of brief presentations by really asking the question and answering the question why reef restoration? What makes it viable for management and why has it become such a hot topic for us that have been researching and working on coral reefs for decades and really to answer those questions we really need to place ourselves in the situation that reefs are facing increasingly by the day. We now know that coral reef futures are increasingly dire under climate change unless we can limit warming to well below one and a half degrees and consequently efforts to manage reefs using existing platforms, which typically comprise protection of areas but also mitigation of local threats, are simply not enough to stem the tide of increasing climate pressures. And this particular problem is not lost on the nearly half a billion people that are dependent on coral reefs to survive. And you only have to go as far as Indonesia. This example here really demonstrates how local communities, local subsistence communities have really had to take action into their own hands to rebuild reefs that have been decimated by blast fishing. So whilst this isn't an example from climate change, it is an example from climate change related processes, overpopulation and simply unsustainable use of reefs. And quite simply, in this case, protection of reefs just simply loses the very values that reefs bring to local communities.

The same kind of context really applies in Australia, where our reefs have unprecedented cultural and ecological value. But importantly, they also have an economic value, and that economic value is largely driven by reef tourism. And so about three or four years ago, the same idea where we were rapidly losing reefs in front of our eyes and the local communities simply wanted to have more power to support stewardship based activities, to rebuild the reefs in real-time and really rehabilitate and maintain the good parts of the reef. So this is an example here where we've been working with reef tourism, launching a program called the Coral Nurture Program, and this was really to try and galvanize momentum amongst industry to play a part in rebuilding reefs and securing not just their own industry values, but, of course, the ecological values of the reef. All of these efforts, whether they are from subsistence fishing or whether they're from tourism industries again has not been lost on the global community and actually this has been a hugely facilitated in the last year or so through the UN, who launched the ecosystem, the decade of ecosystem restoration that started in June this year. And importantly, the idea is to start galvanizing all of this accelerating action worldwide, where local communities are really working hard to preserve their own reef systems on their doorstep. And importantly, this is also to try and similarly collate and align a lot of the interest in investing into these reef restoration activities, whether it's from governments or corporate foundations.

And collectively, the action and investment can start to build a much more coherent picture with which the success of restoration can be executed. So when we talk about reef restoration, however, it's not as simple necessarily as just planting coral. And consequently, I think the term reef restoration is quite often synonymised or confused, if you like, with sort of antiquated approaches to try and garden the reef. And what we actually have now is this huge diversity of tools that are developing, whether it's in the in the top left hand side of this slide through new structures to help consolidated, to help consolidate reef or whether it's in the right hand side, really working with the fact that corals not only reproduce by fragmenting and asexually growing, but also they sexually reproduce via larvae every year. All of these different methods can play a role in a part in this sort of more collective approach to restoring our coral reefs. So really, we're turning to the initial question that we asked, and how is reef restoration a viable management option? Well, there's really four simple ingredients to this. And actually, Emma, Mel and Johnny will really take you on a journey through these four steps. But really, just to outlay these, the first is we need scale. And quite simply, this means we need practices that are easy to adopt and also the finance routes that are straightforward to enable that adoption to deliver scale.

They, of course, have to be viable. They have to deliver what we term ecosystem service outcomes to ensure what we do actually carries a benefit to not just the stakeholders, but the ecosystem itself. And importantly, an action that we've really understood very well in recent years is that it's got to be proactive. By working together, we can actually start to make a difference, just like climate change as a collective problem. Restoration is a collective aid. And then finally, what's critical and Lucy mentioned this at the beginning is that the reef restoration process itself is not a replacement for management. It's a tool that can augment under the right circumstances to make a difference. And all of this has collectively come together as an example recently through our Coral Nurture program, where we demonstrated in recent years because of COVID 19 and tourism downturns that actually tourism industry that's equipped with capacity to rehabilitate the reefs through coral propagation and other restoration type tools can actually retain their asset values, their trained staff and be resilient to future uncertainty. So with that in mind, I'm now going to pass to Emma, and Emma will start to explain some of the scientific processes that we need in place to ensure that we can deliver these these facets.

Thank you, Dave, and I'm going to be speaking today about what the role is of science in the restoration space. Now, a lot of restoration activities have been around for decades, and have often been initiated by practitioners with less involvement from science. But as climate change and biodiversity loss increases around the globe, we are understanding that whilst we fundamentally have to address climate change, that alone is unlikely to be enough and that we also need to use nature-based solutions and start to restore nature to give the best chance of surviving through the future. So that means that we need science involved in this process to ensure that we are utilizing nature and its most efficient form to ensure it has the best chance to build its resilience to future change. So we can think then, that science got three key roles that it can play within the restoration space, first and foremost, is protection. Then it's to actually look at how we restore what are the different methods that make most sense for the local site that we're looking at. And importantly, then knowing that the climate is going to continue to change, the environment is dynamic, and there will be unforeseen impacts as well as foreseen impacts, how can we best prepare this system to have the best chance of future survival and the collective effort of all of this, and really where science is key, is that it wants to maximize success of the efforts that are being undertaken.

And that's really important. We need to understand what is success, because success at one site may not be the same as success at another site, and an example for this could be if there's a ship grounding or some local damage, there may be a very small area that needs to be restored. If a certain area has lost a certain species, then then rehabilitating that one species is very different to say, what we're seeing for areas on the Great Barrier Reef where because of coral bleaching, we've lost quite large areas of reef that requires a different approach. And so this is where science can come in to try and tailor what is needed to maximize the success. And that's ultimately ensuring that the ecosystem has gone back to a state where it has its ecosystem function, the biodiversity and the resilience to future change. So, in protection then, one of the big things that science can do is help us to understand when and where we should protect. We can see three very different reefs seascapes here. One of them is likely beyond repair and it's, you know, there's there's no coral there, it's very, it's not an obvious flat area where we can look at, say, something like larval seeding. And given the effort and energy to look into restoration, we have to be very strategic over the areas where we intervene. On the other side of the spectrum, there are reefs that are still amazingly diverse and have great coral cover. And again, here it wouldn't be appropriate necessarily to intervene because nature is doing well. But in between those, we have sites where there is available space for things like outplanting corals or larval seeding that could use benefit from restoration efforts. So a key part of science is choosing when and where we intervene.

Next, then we have to understand, we picked our site, but what is the best method to use? And Dave touched on a few of these, and it's really highly variable depending on the needs of the sites. So there can be things like larval seeding, where the larval slick is collected and could be transferred to a site where actually there isn't enough natural stock to support natural recovery. Then if there are, say, certain species that needed to be targeted, that's where actually having in-situ nurseries can be really beneficial. So you can then target the individuals that you want to grow up so you can see at the bottom of the screen there's some corals growing up in nursery frames. And this is something that the coral nuture program has been using successfully out in the Great Barrier Reef. And then in some locations, if there isn't available substrate or, for example, after a cyclone, there could be a lot of rubble, then having a structure such as the middle top, you can see where there are actually spiders or frames that can help consolidate the substrate can help provide a base for coral attachment. So again, understanding with practitioners the needs of the sites and in tailoring the scientific and innovative solutions to do that is again another way that science can get involved and contribute to the restoration space.

A really crucial thing that we have to do within the science space is to choose what corals and where we source them from. So this is just a really simplified view of biodiversity. We've got branching corals. We've got boulder corals. And what we choose has different functions to the reef when we out-plant them. Branching corals produce a great 3D structure for fish habitats, but they're more susceptible to storm damage. Whereas the slower, grow, boulder corals may provide less structural complexity, but it may be more resilient to future change. So understanding which corals we out-plant can impact the biodiversity and the functioning of the reef, and that's something we need to understand through the science is what we should be choosing. And also then where those corals come from. So there's two examples here. There are natural sources of broken corals that we can utilize, and that just rebuilds the populations that are naturally there. But again, as mentioned before, we can start to select individual species, build these up, and that gives us a greater abundance and stocks we're not having to take from the environment. Now in these two pictures here, both of those have 100 percent coral cover, but one of them is a monoculture of the same coral species, whereas the other has many different species.

And so again, understanding what we out-plant and where is really important to ensure that we are producing a biodiverse reef that has the functions such as storm protection, such as housing for fishes that we need to ensure the reef's viability. The final thing then to touch on is that we need to ensure the reefs are persisting into the future. We have yet to deal with climate change, and there's a variety of different approaches that are being considered to try and ensure reefs have the best viable future. So this can be things like actually selecting the most tolerant corals from the reef, super corals for example, building these up in nurseries and out planting those. It can be relocating corals from, you know, more tolerant areas to less tolerant areas to boost that resilience and then exploring things like probiotics, synthetic biology and looking at naturally trying to assist the evolution of corals to give them the best chance in the future. All of these have different costs and risks associated with them, which we have to consider when implementing them. And on that note, I'm going to pass over to Mel, who's going to talk to us about some of the costs and things that we have to think about, ensuring that there's a sustainable approach to financing reef restoration activities.

I'm very pleased to be here and be part of this discussion. This is some early stage work that I've been doing in collaboration with colleagues in the business school, particularly Dr Deb Cotton. You might be wondering actually why the business community and why do we have business academics involved in this discussion around reef restoration? And as I'm going to explain in my presentation very briefly, reef restoration and biodiversity restoration more broadly is a risk for everyone. As Dave said at the beginning, it's a collective issue and therefore it requires collective solutions. But more importantly, you know, climate and biodiversity risk are becoming an increasingly material risk for the business and investment community. And so businesses are increasingly understanding their interdependency with the system and their safe habitat for operating business is important, and therefore they have a responsibility to both pay for the crisis and mitigate risk, but also to contribute towards the solutions in terms of restoration. And as we will also see the risk turning into responsibility is important not only just for businesses, but for society, more broadly and for the economy. So what do I mean by this? Well, the first thing we need to do is understand that the reef and ecosystems more broadly have a value. Now, some people might be really concerned when they see dollar signs on nature, particularly for those of us who might think this means nature or the environment can be put up for sale. But in the business way of thinking about valuation of natural capital, there's been a long history of understanding the contribution that these sometimes undervalued ecosystem services play in contributing to our very basic economic activities.

So there've been a number of different studies over many years that have looked at valuing ecosystems. In particular, the ones up here and the numbers I have on-screen relate to a couple of studies that have looked at the Great Barrier Reef in particular and the figures here from a study from Deloitte Economics. Also the total valuation of the reef in terms of its social and economic value mirrors a figure that was previously determined by Oxford Economics. So let me just take you briefly through what we have here. So there's a number of different ways of doing this valuation. One is to actually value the ecosystems themselves for their value that they contribute, and there are methods for doing this, but they have not been as well integrated into the business community. The ones that have been well integrated relate to what we might consider ESG or environmental, social and governance factors being implemented or embedded within economic and financial ways of determining the value of materials and also services. So in this case, we've got the direct economic value of reef activity could be valued at around $6.4 billion to the Australian economy, this takes into account the scientific and research community that we've just been discussing now, as well as the tourism activity, commercial fishing and aquaculture, recreational activities more broadly and also across the board of these activities. That's roughly equivalent to 64000 jobs, and that's pre-pandemic. Another way of looking at that is a much broader valuation, which you can see with the price tag over here on the reef of $56 billion.

Now this valuation takes into account not only those direct values that we draw from the use of and our direct benefit of the reef, but also the kind of social value as an iconic heritage site. What that means for future generations and what people, even if they wouldn't go to the reef or visit the reef, put a price on the value of that reef as an iconic value for Australia. So you can see that the reef does certainly have economic value. But as we know and as our science colleagues have been telling us, this value is being eroded and this is why it's very important for the business community and for the sustainable finance and investing community in particular, to work closely with scientists to understand where the big opportunities, not just from a risk perspective, but where are the opportunities to redirect finance for the types of projects that will have the most benefit, both in terms of restoration of the reef, but also in terms of that social and economic development in those local communities whose livelihoods are dependent upon a healthy and functioning reef. So we also know that this opportunity is something that investors are looking for. So there is a movement in the finance and investment community towards sustainable investing RIAA in their recent report, where they looked at the thematic concerns for investors.

So where do investors want to see their money go? The main thematic concern was still climate. However, 21 per cent of people said that the investment in natural capital of the kind that we're discussing here is an important consideration for where they would like to see their money going so we can see that there is an opportunity. But to date, most of the funding that has gone towards projects of ecosystem restoration, more broadly ocean conservation and in this case, reef restoration still comes from philanthropic sources from funds, grants, donations, sponsorships and endowments and government funding. These are really important mechanisms, and there are a lot of really wonderful initiatives that have been able to benefit from these sources of funding. But the problem remains that we have a gap between those funding sources and the total amount of capital that is required to restore the reef now, and also in the future going forward, if we can't mitigate some of the more dramatic effects of climate. So where are these solutions going to come from? And we know that for large scale investment to move into activities like reef restoration, there needs to be scale of viable, you know, reef activities that investors still look for a return on their investments. So this is necessary. So there might be some opportunities within reef restoration for this, and this is something that we're exploring in our research, not only just to understand the loss and mitigating the risk. Currently, there are instruments that are developed from banks, for example, and the insurance sector to ensure that in an event of crisis, risks can actually be insured.

But we also want to think about what are the restoration opportunities and how can we think about the multiplier effect of investing into reef restoration for that economic activity more broadly? But perhaps it's not always the big solutions that we need to be looking at, and it is a complex picture. So as you know, both of our scientists have told us, the solutions are small scale as well, and there is an opportunity to look at these small scale opportunities and to then think about the way that they can generate the livelihood of that reef. The business models that are being used by these smaller operatives are not necessarily the same as we might see in the corporate or business sector. There is an opportunity here to explore social enterprises, for example, where the revenues generated can be put back into the reef restoration activities or put back into the science and also stay within the local communities. There's opportunities to develop partnerships with the local tourism providers so that they can understand the science as well, work with scientists, work with those tourists and develop a partnership approach to looking at sustainable development of reef restoration. And on that note, I'm going to hand over to Johnny, who is going to talk us through some of these exciting activities that are happening at the moment up in the Whitsunday area.

Thanks, Mel. Well, good afternoon everybody to World Science Day. Following on from what Mel was just saying, I've been working on a couple of projects here in the Whitsundays, where the collaboration with local community and tourism operators, traditional owners has been really the most important factor in ensuring that these projects continue on. So as the Reef Islands Initiative Coordinator I've been looking at some of the old, some of the projects that have been underway over the last couple of years and then are working on a few new exciting initiatives in the future, working with tourism operators, community and even tourists. There's been obviously a lot of changes in the Great Barrier Reef and living in the Whitsundays on a little small island on the western side of those islands, you can see there, Daydream Island over the last seven years, I've been able to see a lot of changes, some good changes, some recovery. But the most significant was certainly the impact from the six to seven metre cyclonic waves that came from Cyclone Debbie. On this map here, you can see any of those green areas that hit the edge of the islands where the fringing reefs were, we lost. We went from about 70 to 80 per cent coral cover down to five to eight per cent coral cover. And unfortunately, these were the exposed sites. They were the sites that are generally good for coral growth and have healthy coral reefs, and they were also our primary tourism sites.

So over the next couple of years, we did see some recovery, but it's been very slow. The impact you can see here, this is where I was living one of my favourite little spots to jump in each night and hang out with the fish. It went from about an 80 per cent coral cover reef. This is a reef flat, so it's a bit more soft coral. But there's also branching corals a little bit deeper at the site to an algae garden. And it still looks like that today, and it just demonstrates the power of the waves. This photo here not only did it take out soft corals, which are fairly tough and hardy, but it even was able to damage the body tissue of corals that remained in place to the point where they weren't able to survive. So that, as well as the fact that we have some water quality issues in the Whitsundays, has been a big challenge for the region to recover. You can see there on the left, this is pre cyclone because I wanted to show even pre cyclone the water quality issues locally were there. It's not just a result of the cyclone washing a whole heap of sediment down, which is down the rivers into the area, which did happen. There's been a build up of sediment and high nutrients for many, many years for a number of reasons land clearing, dredging and vegetation loss, even on the islands as well.

So the problem now is these reefs are really struggling to recover on their own. On the right there, you can see Daydream Island, the western side reef covered in branching aquapora, and there's some plate corals in there as well. It was about 70 percent coral cover. And then last year, which is the same as what it's like today, it's really undergone a complete phase shift to an algal garden. And those areas where Coral would normally recruit, where the algae isn't, they're covered in turf algae and sediment. So it's making it extremely hard for these areas to recover. Another limitation, unfortunately, we have experienced in the Whitsundays was last year we had the first bleaching event that I'd witnessed in the eight years that I've been here during was actually during COVID, so not many people actually got out to see it. But living on the island, we were able to get around and survey a number of the hard corals sites that remained after Cyclone Debbie, and there was about an 80 per cent bleaching rate in hard coral cover. And some of you may not have seen many photos during this bleaching event in Whitsundays, because there was barely anyone out there. Technically was locked down, but this was work, so we were able to whizz around and check the sites.

We did see recovery. Luckily, there was a storm that came through in March that you can see on the graph where water temperature dropped dramatically, but it took about four weeks for those corals to start to recover after the temperature dropped below the 30 degree mark in the water. So there was some coral mortality and had the storm come through a week later, we may have lost a higher percentage, and there is only a few of these hard coral dominant sites left in the Whitsundays at the moment. So the projects we started working on after realising that maybe we need to intervene here, look at the recovery is so limited, there's so many impacts that are hindering recovery naturally. A few projects started in 2019. The project I led was the ex-situ nurseries on Daydream Island, and these were the first ex-situ nurseries with a primary focus of restoration in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The goal here was to involve tourists, so because it was out of the water, tourists are actually able to come onto the island and be part of the propagation process. The in-situ nurseries at Hook Island, they were put in the water at the same time, and Emma touched on some of the in-situ nurseries and the techniques around that method of restoration. This involved the local community, so this was trying to get the local community and more invested in restoration through volunteering.

And more recently, we have a larval reseeding project underway here at the moment, with AIMS and Southern Cross University as part of the Reef Islands Initiative. And this is using the tourism operators and traditional owners. So by trying to invest in tourists, getting involved, the community get involved, the tourism operators and the traditional owners. We're hoping that this will allow these projects to go or remain ongoing. I'm just going to go into a little bit of detail not too long on some of the projects so you can get a bit of a case study on how they work. Emma was mentioning super corals as well during their presentation, the donor corals for the Daydream Island ex-situ nurseries are taken from the marina there. That was the only area in the mall group or around Daydream Island, where no corals were impacted by the cyclone. So the marina actually helped us in that way, and because the water's warmer inside the marine and the corals are much more resilient and hopefully can do or recover or sustain longer in a changing climate. Getting the tourists involved so you can see there bottom left, some of the tourists were able to get involved. The Daydream Island continues to run these tours. It's a free tour where guests to the island can come and learn about coral restoration and get involved in the propagation process, working with one of the marine biologists on board.

And just this is an example of why we do it. Coral reefs do naturally recover on their own. It does take a long time, but the struggle around these inshore islands, with the added impacts of water quality and also the impacts of bleaching, we are seeing much slower recovery on the left there. You can see that that control bommie that's going with Daydream Island is covered in algae and then on the right you can see the out-plants that have come from the nursery. Hopefully, the idea is that the out-plants continue to grow, block the light from where the algae is growing and then slowly will start to get grazing herbivores back with fish that eat the algae and start to phase shift that back to a coral reef. Because this bommie was completely covered in coral pre cyclone, and four years later, they're still showing very limited recruitment. In-situ nurseries, I won't go too much into too much detail and or into limited detail on these, but basically they're ex-situ nurseries in-situ in the water, collecting corals attaching to cement discs, and they're out-planting them onto the reef and the out-planting process involved members of the community during this project. Larval reseeding project is really getting these tourism operators involved, and the project we're working on locally is called Boats for Coral, and that's using tourism operator boats to do the work.

So inviting tourism operators to come out and the way it works is you collect coral spawn after the coral spawn slick forms on the top of the water. The tourism boats go around with buckets and nets, collect the spawn and put them into these larval pools, and they stay there for six days or so, and then the eggs hatch, form into larvae, develop into larvae and then they're deployed on to damage reef. So you can see here we've involved the traditional owners this year, which has been great. Some of the owners came down and did a smoke ceremony to welcome the tourism operators to their region and there's five traditional owners that have been coming out and are staying on the mother ship with us at the end of this month. So that will mean that the traditional owners are totally involved and will actually become part of the project. A lot of these traditional owners haven't been back to country for a long time, so they're coming down from north of Townsville to their country that they haven't seen, which is amazing. The tourism operator involvement you can see down the bottom here, it's ocean rafting, one of the tourism operators driving along. That's Professor Peter Harrison at the front is collecting coral spawn, and then top right Redcape is moving the coral, the larval pools around to deploy them onto the reef.

And you can see that at the bottom of how that process works. So these early projects, these three early projects using or working with operators, community groups and everyone locally has been one of the driving forces of the Whitsunday Reef Islands initiative. And we had a workshop earlier this year and brought everyone together. Basically discuss what worked, what didn't. Looked at the baseline mapping data that was produced by University of Queensland, which is where that cyclone map came from, and determine which sites would be the ideal sites for restoration based on water quality, the likelihood of cyclones coming through and damaging it again, and which sites are less likely to recover on their own because of poor connectivity as larval sinks. So we are at the stage now where we're getting, you know, getting a lot of information that's helping guide restoration in the future locally. But at the end of the day, it's really these sites that are unable to recover that we're focusing on and trying to work with everyone. So hopefully it can be sustainable. And this is, just thought I'd put a picture of plaque. This is one of the sites from the top side of that island where the fringing is that's been totally wiped out, almost totally wiped out by the waves came from Cyclone Debbie. And that is me. Thank you very much, everyone.

Thank you so much, Johnny. And thank you very much to all of our presenters today. What a fascinating and inspiring set of talks. So just a reminder we're now going to move into the Q&A section and we've already received some fantastic questions through the Q&A function. If you'd still like to submit a question, please feel free to do so using the Q&A chat. I'm now going to ask all of our presenters to come back on screen and we'll tackle some of these, these great questions that have come through today. So Emma, I'm going to ask you the first one, one that came through from our initial registration. You touched on this a little bit before about the super corals and transplanting. And Johnny, you just mentioned it about the marina and the waters being warmer. But the question that we've received is is it possible to transplant more robust corals from outside Australia, from other coral reefs and transplant them onto the reef in Australia? So in theory, it could be possible, but there's a lot of complexities, even moving corals within a reef in different locations within a reef itself. So the first thing there's international permits, things to think about and then beyond that, just the biology itself. The corals are really well adapted to the environment that they're raised in, and that's one of the reasons that they're so successful. So we often find that even moving corals locally, things like the natural differences in light, the sedimentation can impact things like the bacteria, the type of algae that associate with the coral, and all of that affects how well it survives. So although it's not impossible at this stage, it's something that is probably highly unlikely, and the efforts would more be looking at locally which corals are there that could be potentially moved that are already resilient within the location where they found. Fantastic. Thank you, Emma and Johnny, an extension of that question from one of our audience members. Do corals establish more effectively when the larva are captured than they would naturally. It was one of those slides that you explained about all of the different ways that you're using restoration practices.

Yeah. So I guess the individual larvae that manages to get to a suitable surface, it would be, it's probably the same. There's no there's no advantage of captive larvae. But when you capture or when you consolidate the eggs and you have 3000, you know, we deployed three million larvae last week. When you have that much larvae consolidated onto one area, you just got a much higher chance of survival. When coral spawns, that spawn sits as a slick on the top. And if it escapes the mouth of a little damselfish or a little herring or something that's whizzing around trying to eat everything or doesn't get washed out to sea where there's no suitable site, the chance of it settling is about one in a million. Through the larval reseeding project, it's about one in 10000. It reduces the odds or increases the odds of survival and reduces the odds of getting eaten by someone else.

Absolutely. Thank you, Jonny. And Mel, I'm going to come to you now. We've received some really great questions about the economy around the reef, one that we've received during registration. How does, you mentioned about the value in that staggering figure of fifty six billion dollars of our reef systems and value? So have you got an idea or can you give the audience indication how the destruction of the coral reef is affecting Australia's economy? Well, that's a really great question. And you know, obviously we haven't got that modelling at hand, especially in recent times, given the pandemic effects that have happened to the sort of the tourism activity. But certainly, the mitigation tells us that there is a need for some financial instruments to be set up to insure against the damage to the risk to the reef. And that's kind of been the main way that that has been valued in financial terms. Yeah, great. And Dave, coming to you now. So with ocean warming happening and a number of these other stresses facing coral reefs, is ocean warming the greatest threat at the moment, would you say? And what is the current status of bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef?

Well, obviously climate change is an incredibly hot topic at the moment with COP26, and I think this has really helped highlight the messaging that unless we limit warming not just to under 1.5 degrees, but really limiting it as much as possible, it really is going to be catastrophic for reefs. They've already changed well beyond recognition from, say, 30 years ago through repeat heatwave events, and those heatwave events are driven by ocean warming. So in other words, we have these increasingly frequent but more intense thermal events during summer, which is already at the upper limits for many of our corals to grow and grow well. And that's obviously pushing these mass bleaching events and in turn, driving to mortality. So when we think about what has bleaching done to the Great Barrier Reef are really again, very timely question. A paper was released just yesterday that demonstrated only two percent of all corals on the Great Barrier Reef have escaped bleaching in the last 30 years. So it really paints the picture now that that all corals on the Great Barrier Reef at some point have been touched by climate change. And just how severe it can be. Now, importantly, corals can recover from bleaching if given a chance if it's not severe enough in terms of intensity or duration, corals can recover, but of course, these climate events are making those events just so intense. So to come back to the question, yes, solving heating is our biggest challenge. We have to solve that if we're going to have reefs in the future. But really, the point we're trying to make with restoration is that any activity to help rebuild biomass and rebuild it quickly beyond natural recovery gives us that extra time to be able to solve climate change because clearly it's in the hands of the policymakers at the moment, which makes it very uncertain.

Absolutely. A wonderful question that I wanted to ask too, and is coming through is how can people get involved in these fantastic programs? Johnny, you mentioned about the tourism, the tourists in the Whitsundays, but all of our speakers have spoken about the incredibly diverse teams that contribute to these efforts. Is there a way for volunteers or visitors or students to participate or contribute to the work that you're doing?

Yeah, luckily, that that certainly is, I guess, from a community point of view, going out with a high standard tourism operator. There's a lot of those that are involved in coral restoration throughout the whole of the Great Barrier Reef, but even locally in the Whitsundays, you have a lot of these operators that are involved, you know, they have it on their website and you can see how you can be involved. As far as students can be involved, some of the operators are looking for students to come on board and be part of it. I know for the larval reseeding project, we're looking at taking a few students out on in a couple of weeks, the trip out to down the mother ship. So there's definitely opportunity there, but you know, the best way to find out is to come to the reef. Go out with an operator. Have a look. Talk to people in different regions because it's different everywhere, and you can normally get your answer on site.

Fantastic, Johnny, thank you, so I guess the best place to be to go for our audience would be to your website for the program and maybe submit an inquiry there.

Yeah, if anyone had any questions, that's really ideal.

So wonderful. Emma, Dave, was there anything that you wanted to add to give for potential university students and how they might get involved in studying or participating in this type of research?

I wasn't sure whether where I would jump in first, but now that I've unmuted, I'll jump in very quickly and just say that, you know, a lot of our research within future reefs for example, we still really focus on the core biology of corals, and that's critical because we need to more, you know, more than ever, we need to understand how they grow, how the environment shapes that and how we can therefore propagate coral. So a lot of our research actually has moved from that sort of core understanding to its applied understanding. And so many of our students that join the program undertake fundamental science, but it's embedded within the actual industry activity. So that's a great way in which many students coming into the system can get involved and actually make a difference through the research on the front line, which is really important not just for them but for us.

Fantastic. Thank you. Mel, another question for you and a common one that we've received both in registration and live today is how can we make a difference as consumers? How can individuals either invest in sustainable finance or make consumer choices that would help support some of the initiatives that you were talking about? Yeah, I mean, it's such a great question, and there are so many different ways that I could answer this, especially when we've just talked about the complexity, right, and the interdependency between these ecosystems. So there's kind of like really direct ways. And then there's sort of indirect ways of doing that, but certainly the most direct way that most people can do if you've got superannuation, then you have the ability to be able to decide where your superannuation funds go. Then you certainly choose a sustainable portfolio or ask your, you know, ask the person managing your superannuation if they can help you with this decision. So it can be a complex decision, but that's what those services are there for. And, you know, in terms of the broader question as well that you asked about students getting involved, I would say if anyone is here from the business student community, it's really important to understand and understand the science, speak to scientists. I mean, you know, this isn't the beginning of a collaboration that we've been working on with C-3, and I've learnt so much as a business academic being involved in this. But even in the business school, it's understanding sustainable finance and what it is putting your bright minds towards, you know, the type of modelling that's required to answer the question that you asked me up-front, about how can we understand climate effects on the damages to these ecosystems and particularly in the context of a post-pandemic world? These are questions, and we want all the smart minds we can possibly get working on them. Absolutely. And that's something I've certainly taken away from today that it would require such a diversity of thought and perspective and experience that if we're going to solve these big problems and create innovations and solutions, we need to have everyone involved in this. So that leaves an open question to everyone, really, which is this really delicate balance when we're talking about these very complex ecosystems, the help versus harm question. When do you know when it's the right time to intervene? No one wants to take this? Dave.

I'll jump in just to initiate some response because it is a huge topic. I think it's multilayered as well in terms of the answers and so on. I can touch on some and no doubt everyone else will have additional thoughts. But you know, when do we do more harm? Well, at this stage, I think most people, whether it's scientists or stakeholders, are of the mindset that it's better to do something for nothing. You know, our only options, you know, to some extent at the moment are lobbying to reduce climate emissions. So to many as well, that's very unsatisfying in the sense that we need also some immediate alternative actions to make a difference. However, restorations are really, really young fields, not just for reefs, but for forests or for mangroves or for seagrass. So we still don't actually know the answers as to how well our activities are ultimately making a difference to the ecology and to society. Now, having said that, a lot of our really early efforts already showed that we are improving coral biomass. We're improving diversity, but we're only able to achieve that through a really scientifically rigorous process. So again, some of that scientific rigorous process is identifying actually, there are points where we don't want to restore reefs, and Emma really made some great points about that and understanding the local ecologies and the and the local use of the reef. And ultimately, we shouldn't be looking at restoring every single reef. So it's making targeted decisions. So in terms of harm versus help, at this point in time, we certainly are helping. But the question is to what extent.

And I imagine, as you said, it takes all lots of different changes, lots of different factors, lots of different levers to be pulled in order to tackle such a complex question.

Absolutely.

Emma, did you want to jump in as well? Yeah. Just to add to that, I think some of the innovative techniques I touched on, a lot of those are in an, you know, an R&D stage at the moment. And that's because we ultimately need to start to test them to be able to get to that answer. Is it going to work? Is it going to do more harm than good? Because it's like a portfolio. It's like a toolbox of approaches and not one of them is going to be the solution to everything. But again, as Dave pointed out, to addressing climate change and lobbying is kind of the biggest tool that we have, but we know that that's not enough at the moment. So again, by exploring this portfolio, we can say, OK, these ones work, these ones don't. This is how we can improve them. But the bottom line is that we need that information and that science, so that if we get to a point where the only option is to throw everything at it, we have this information in this scientific backing to say, OK, actually, this is the best way that we can implement that and that will help reduce the risk. And you know, for context, when we do these activities, there's a rigorous process. There's permitting, there are discussions, there is a risk mindset that's put into place when we go into this. So again, an example would be if we're going to move corals between locations and we are allowed to do that. You think about things about when is when are they reproductively active and should we move them back before they are spawning? So all of these things are being considered so that we kind of iteratively minimize the risk to maximize a positive outcome from our activities.

Awesome. Thank you, Emma, and I'm just going to stay with you and then anyone else who wants to jump in on this as well? Just getting into the nitty gritty, then when you're doing this work, we've received a great question online, which is when a coral is bleached, I think this is speaking to your choice of where to go and the intervention or choosing. The question is when a coral is bleached, is the coral left on the reef or is it removed to make space for new corals? So I think they've kind of touched in this area, but the really important thing is just because the corals bleach doesn't necessarily mean that it's died at that point in time. So if the stress isn't prolonged, then the coral may recover. So just because it's bleached, we definitely wouldn't remove it or anything. At that point in time, we would hope that it may naturally recover. Now, if it doesn't, then it obviously still produces that 3D structure that forms the reef. And so we would try to naturally use that substrate for the different techniques we've discussed. Now in some cases, that may mean that there actually isn't the best substrate available for restoration, and there could be then discussion to have as to whether or not that needs to be manipulated. But at the moment, rather than actually removing that or changing that, we just changed the type of technique we would implement. So, for example, using a star that would go over that to produce a more favorable environment for the space. So the key is that structure it leaves is still kind of important for new coral to potentially recruit onto. Fantastic. Look we, we're really short of time now and I'm sorry, I have received so many fantastic questions and we haven't been able to get them all through today. But I would like to thank you all the panelists today for such an exciting talk and a really wonderful opportunity to learn more about the incredible impact that your work and your collaboration is having to protect these incredible ecosystems. So lastly, for our audience, if you would like to learn more, we are going to, sorry, let me just bring up this last slide so you can see this information. Here we go. We'll be sending a copy of today's talk as long as well as the Q&A session to everyone who registered, and it will also be on our website very soon. So if you've got any other questions been spoken about today, you can get them through the participant's websites and we wish you a very happy World Science Day and thank you for joining us.