APPALLING DECISION ON DUMPING DREDGE SPOIL IN GREAT BARRIER REEF MARINE PARK

A Clarence Valley resident has written to Dr Russell Reichelt, Chair of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (MPA) about the MPA's decision to allow 3 million cubic metres of dredge spoil to be dumped in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The text of this letter is printed below.

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I was appalled when I heard that the Marine Park Authority Board had approved the dumping of dredge spoil from the Abbot Point Port development within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. 

Your decision is continuing the dangerous precedent which you set when you allowed spoil from the Hay Point development to be dumped in the Marine Park some years ago.  With this latest decision you are confirming that short-term economic interests are much more important than the protection of the iconic marine ecosystems for which you are responsible.

You have imposed conditions to govern the dumping but just how sure are you that these conditions will be met and that they will actually do what they are supposed to do?

As I understand it, there were other options available for disposal of this dredged material but none of them were canvassed.  Was this because dumping in the Marine Park was the cheapest option?

Given there are other port proposals for the Reef coastline, what are you going to decide next time?  It would seem likely that you will agree again – and again - and again.

Just what consideration have you given to the cumulative effects of this disruption of ecosystems in the Marine Park area?  Have you concluded that there won't be any?

It seems to me that you have caved in to the pro-mining-development Federal and Queensland Governments as well as to the large mining companies.  Your decision is a disgrace.

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The independent grass-roots lobbying organisation GetUp is calling on those opposed to the dumping decision to consider donating to a Reef Fighting Fund which will be used to mount a legal challenge against this decision.  The case will be run by the Environmental Defenders Office of Queensland which will be representing the North Queensland Conservation Council.

SOME EFFECTS OF AUSTRALIA'S COAL EXPORTS ON CHINA

While Australia ramps up its export of greenhouse gas emissions (coal and gas), at the expense of national icons such as the Great Barrier Reef, spare a thought for the recipients in south east Asia as reported in The Guardian.

According to a Greenpeace-commissioned report by Dr Andrew Gray, a US-based expert on air pollution, emissions from coal plants in China were responsible for a quarter of a million premature deaths annually, and are damaging the health of hundreds of thousands of Chinese children.

The statistics are staggering, with estimates that coal burning in 2011 alone, “led to 320,000 children and 61,000 adults suffering from asthma, 36,000 babies being born with low weight, was responsible for 340,000 hospital visits, and 141 million days of sick leave”.

In Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang provinces, pollution levels have repeatedly been off the charts, leading to soaring sales of air purifiers and face masks, with retailers struggling to meet demand. The city of Nanjing recently issued a red alert for pollution for five consecutive days.

It is well known that coal burning, even in modern power plants, produces heavy metal and particulate pollution which, according to the editor of China Dialogue, an independent website that publishes information and debate on the environment in China, is now occurring in China, “on a scale that is getting quite extraordinary”.

Dr Gray reports “while the growth of coal consumption has slowed, 570 new coal-fired plants are either being built or are planned, and if they go ahead would be responsible for a further 32,000 premature deaths each year”.

The Chinese government has announced a plan to tackle air pollution including, for the first time, measures to cut coal consumption by 2017.

So the Australia will have four years of increased production.  Does this justify continuing its plans to increase Hunter Valley air pollution, and spread it to areas like Gunnedah and Boggabri ?   Does it justify polluting the Great Barrier Reef, destroying the critically endangered woodland communities of the Leard State Forest, Bimblebox Sanctuary, and the Pilliga State Conservation Area, along with the threatened wildlife that call those forests home?

-           John Edwards

This post was originally published in the "Voices for the Earth" column in The Daily Examiner on 27 January, 2014.

GREAT BARRIER REEF FACING EXTINCTION

The Great Barrier Reef is 2,300km long and 9,000 years old, and it annually pumps some $6 billion into the Australian economy. Each year 2 million people from around the world are drawn to experience it, stoking up the coffers of Queensland's boating, swimming, snorkelling, diving and hospitality businesses that employ in excess of 50,000 people.

Several other nations once boasted similar wonderful reefs, but through waste, ignorance, overfishing and other dire exploitations almost all are collapsing, dying, or already gone.

The delicate algae that supply corals with nutrition are being killed by over-warm waters. With temperatures regularly reaching record heights, reefs around the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean and the tourism-driven Asian Pacific islands are on the brink of no return.

Corals are not just another renewable form of vegetation, as governments appear to think. They are the fragile, chemically-derived creations of numerous microscopic animals. As such our reef is already jeopardised. Storms are increasingly violent. Floods wash massive amounts of agricultural chemicals and unnatural debris into the sea. The breakdown of tonnes of agricultural and domestic waste is altering the ocean's natural chemical make-up. And now the quick and irreparable impact by wealth-driven corporations, encouraged by our present government, is threatening to deliver yet another blow.

While the sea is capable of absorbing 50 times more carbon dioxide than the atmosphere can do, the constant over supply we are pouring into it is reacting with the corals, rendering them weak and easily broken by rough conditions that they would normally withstand. Marine biologists predict total disintegration of the harder corals once CO₂ parts per million (ppm) levels in the atmosphere reach 400 to 500 ppm. Currently those levels stand at around 385 ppm.

Our reef is facing extinction. But to our current government this sensational asset is apparently dispensable. Instead of fiercely protecting this particular goose that  lays the extraordinary egg that reliably feeds so many people, our governments are a patsy to industry that will in time destroy it. The loud warnings are aggressively ignored, setting our fragile reef well on track to follow the others into obliteration.

-          Patricia Edwards

This article was published in the "Voices for the Earth" column of the  The Daily Examiner on Monday 20 January 2014.