Also, cool note on the economics: “Experts estimate that coral reef services are worth up to $1.2 million per hectare which translates to an average of $172 billion per year.”
Someone do the math, what is the value of this comeback in USD?
About USD 120 billion.
I’m always sceptical of these claims in the media that economists say that something “could be worth up to $X billion/year” or “X costs the economy $Y billion/year”. They are based on assumptions, whose veracity may be unknowable-if not just totally unrealistic; and the error bars on such estimates must be huge, but many journalists will only cite the upper error bar.
The point of these claims is to try to get people to understand that climate destruction events have meaning, and if negative economic effects are the most straightforward way to explain that, then so be it.
https://cairnsnews.org/2022/07/22/coral-harvesting-on-the-gr...
At least it seems they've stopped wholesale grinding it up for fertilizer.
I'd add that the recent recovery has been used by some climate change deniers as justification for ignoring the bigger picture, a sad situation given Australia's emissions per capita.
I too dove on the reef in the early 1990s and have seen no reef of that caliber since, anywhere.
While I understand per capita for fairness, etc, for systems like the GBR this is meaningless compared to absolute output. Australians could individually emit 4x what a Chinese person does and would matter very little given the low population of Australia.
It's not even really fair. Do those measures account for the emissions of everything we purchase from overseas? China is an outsourced factory for the world. It's hard to point the finger at China's emissions when a large chunk of the developed world's goods are produced by them.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capit...
Say we import 10,000,000 beanie babies and we know each one requires an average of 100kg of CO2 to manufacture and export. Based on that data could we determine more accurate per capita emissions?
Not sure if this would be entirely pointless to approximate or makes no sense to begin with.
You could categorize it as domestic emissions and market/demand emissions.
https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
From a cursory googling it seems that 'consumption-based accounting' is something that is being heavily researched, and we need to start distinguishing it from the simplistic and flawed 'production-based accounting' in the press, and in political discourse.
Could start with the existing system of international cargo categories and order of magnitude production emissions and packing assumptions based upon standard containers (refrigerated or 40" TEU or whatever). Then add trucking, storage and distribution metrics.