Can't dump on Great Barrier Reef but you can next door

This could muddy the waters. Australia has announced it will not allow the dumping of dredged up material inside the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. But it has not put limits on dredging itself inside the park, or dumping inside the larger World Heritage Area, where most of it occurs anyway, and from where the plumes of dredging spoil can drift onto the reef and choke life.

There are plans to expand five ports inside the marine park, and these are likely to involve dredging. The first and most controversial one has been at Abbot Point, for which the government recently overturned plans to dump in the Marine Park, and decided to dump on land instead.

But with four other potential port expansions, the issue has remained hotly debated.

“All of those proposals for disposal in the marine park are gone,” Greg Hunt, the federal minister for the environment, told the decadal World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia today. “Secondly, in terms of future, we will use the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority Act… to put in place this ban in legislative form.”

Drifting sediment

Conservation organisation WWF hailed the move as an important step forward, but noted that in some ways it is a small change from current practice.

“More than 80 per cent of dumping since 2010 has occurred outside the marine park but within the World Heritage Area, where it can easily drift onto coral and seagrass,” says WWF-Australia CEO Dermot O’Gorman.

“We urge the Government to build on this and announce a full ban on dumping in the entire Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area.”

But Selina Ward from the University of Queensland in Brisbane says the announcement is a distraction.

“It’s taking attention away from the whole process of dredging,” she says. The dredging itself causes massive plumes of soil, which chokes coral and seagrass, and that will continue inside the marine park despite the dumping ban.

Complete disaster

Ward also notes that dumping dredging spoil on land is not always a solution either. After announcing it will not dump dredge from the Abbot Point expansion onto the reef, the government announced it would try to fast-track plans to dump the millions of tonnes of sludge on the Caley wetlands.

“That’s a complete disaster,” says Ward. “It’s going to really damage the wetlands and ultimately, in a flood, it will come into the water anyway.”

At the congress, the government also announced it would contribute an extra A$6 million towards the Coral Triangle Initiative, which aims to protect marine and coastal resources in the species-rich Coral Triangle in South-East Asia, known as “the Amazon of the seas”, as well as A$700,000 towards programmes to reduce marine and coastal debris around the Great Barrier Reef.