The Great Barrier Reef should be added to a list of world heritage sites that are “in danger”, according to United Nations officials.

Australian officials plan to challenge the UN move as politically motivated.

UNESCO, the world body’s educational, scientific and cultural agency, on Monday recommended placing the massive coral ecosystem on the list, ahead of a July meeting of the World Heritage Committee in Fuzhou, China.

The UNESCO report urges Australia to take “accelerated action at all possible levels” to address the threat from climate change. Australia is one of the only wealthy nations that has not pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, and is facing pressure to do so.

The country’s environment minister, Sussan Ley, said in a statement yesterday that Australia would “strongly oppose” the draft recommendation, which she said was a “backflip on previous assurances from UN officials”.

“We have been singled out,” she said in an interview on Australia’s state broadcaster. “There’s about 82 properties that are at risk of climate change... and they’ve singled out Australia for this unprecedented approach.”

Greenpeace Australia Pacific chief executive David Ritter said the country’s politicians “are finding that they cannot hide from the truth forever”.

“For too long, a succession of Australian prime ministers have hidden behind the big lie that you can protect the Great Barrier Reef without rapidly reducing greenhouse gas emissions from burning coal, oil and gas,” he said. The reef was “paying the price” for Australia’s failure to reduce emissions, he added.

The US officially rejoined the Paris climate accord in February, marking its return to the global effort to prevent the planet from warming past a critical threshold.

The Great Barrier Reef has been hit hard by rising temperatures in recent years. Underwater heat waves triggered coral bleaching events in 2016, 2017 and 2020 so severe that scientists say that the reef will never look the same again.

Coral bleaching occurs when corals are stressed by a change in environmental conditions. They react by expelling the symbiotic algae that live in their tissues and then turn completely white.

The reef is important to Australia. Government officials successfully lobbied for details of damage to the reef to be scrubbed from a 2016 UNESCO report on threatened heritage sites so that it would not affect tourism. Before the coronavirus pandemic, more than two million tourists travelled to Queensland state each year from all over the world to visit the reef.

© Washington Post