Climate Change: How can the Great Barrier Reef be saved? - BBC Travel Show

Australia's Great Barrier Reef is enormous. It's about the size of Italy, and you can see it from space. Around 10% of all fish species live here. As a diver, there aren't many places that can beat it. Due to increased water temperatures, there's been several mass bleaching events here on the Great Barrier Reef. 2016 and 2017, especially, coupled that with a severe tropical cyclone, and up to 80% of the reef was affected. For myself, an ocean lover, it's very worrying. But there are stretches, like here on the southern part, that still thrive. Schools of fish, rays, sharks, and turtles are all abundant. How perfect is that? Billions of little tiny jewels. They were chromis? Yeah, blue-green chromis. It's incredible down there, Rachel. Wow. Rachel Jones has worked in these waters for 18 months now. The Marine Park authorities have rewarded her efforts by giving her Master Reef Guide status. So tell me about the health of the reef we saw down there today. It's very healthy. There's just so much diversity here. I mean, that there, it's suggested 900 years old. So it's just coral that's died off and built up over time. What are some of the main threats facing the Great Barrier Reef? So we're all aware of the threats of the reef. You know, the rising sea surface temperatures, ocean acidification, we're all aware of it. But we need as many people as we can to see the Great Barrier Reef, because they're gonna fall in love with it, as you have. And then they go home and protect the Great Barrier Reef and all the reefs in the world. But then if more people are coming here, there's more people flying, and therefore more carbon emissions, isn't that bad for the reef? We need as many people as we can to see the reef. And, you know, they can choose sustainable options. And every person that visits the Great Barrier Reef pays an environmental levy. So they're playing a part every time they come. Save some fun for me! There has been a significant breakthrough this year that has seen new life brought back to dead and dying reefs. One night a year, the coral simultaneously release millions of eggs and sperm into the waters. It looks like a massive underwater snowstorm. Professor Harrison has set about capturing that spawn and relocating it to areas that need it most. Okay, what's the plan? Okay, Mike, so what we're gonna do is we're gonna ask you to take these calipers and just go down and measure the coral. He measures the new coral regularly and has found that it's been thriving. But he's also found that after three years, it's sexually reproductive, triggering a domino effect of regeneration. Can you tell us a bit about the breakthrough you've made? Yeah, so what we've been doing is some really exciting research. One of the innovations that we've just trialed in the Philippines is using an underwater robot, which we've called Luna, the larval bot. And Luna is helping us deliver literally millions of coral larvae onto really degraded reef systems. And the really exciting news is that we've got to hectare scales, which means we can start to think about large-scale restoration using this larval technique on reefs all around the world, including the Great Barrier Reef. This is just part of the solution. We have to restore coral populations, but we also have to manage climate change.