Is the Great Barrier Reef dead? Satire, death and environmental communication

Abstract

An obituary for the Great Barrier Reef (the Reef) by travel and food writer Rowan Jacobsen (2016) commemorated its ‘lifetime accomplishments’ in Outside, the US outdoor recreational magazine. ‘News’ of the Reef's demise went viral and the economic and political furore that followed was immense. Tourism industries, especially reliant on international arrivals, were impacted as potential visitors accepted the Reef's passing as fact. Politicians scampered to reassure Australians and the globe that the Reef was indeed still alive and beautiful. In the Australian public sphere, climate science deniers, alongside those advocating for climate action, collided over the impacts of global warming to Reef health. Subsequent mass coral bleaching events in 2016, 2017 and 2020 sustained at the very least, the idea that the Reef was, or was soon to be, dead. Our paper follows the idea of a ‘dead Reef’ in the context of historical and recent debates about Reef protection. Using Google Trends, we identify Jacobsen's article as the source of increased Australian and global ideation of a ‘dead Reef’. As a site of local and global environmental communication – where human relations to nature are expressed and understood - the Reef holds extraordinary story telling power. At the current junction then, the way we communicate the Reef is critical to public understanding and political action on climate change. We conclude Jacobsen's article is an example of the problems of satirical communication, serving to amplify existing conflicts and undermine efforts to foster to climate action.

Evolving Narratives in Tourism and Climate Change Research: Trends, Gaps, and Future Directions

“…Concerning Australia, the Great Barrier Reef and Queensland have been major foci of research in that country, with 81 occurrences and a link strength of 794 and 287, respectively. Coral reefs face multiple threats from global warming and subsequent sea surface temperature increases [87]. Several articles focussing on the impact [88,89], adaptation [90], mitigation [89], and resilience of this World Heritage Site have been produced during the period of study from a tourism and climate change perspective.…”

“…Considerable attention has also been paid to the vulnerability of Alps tourism destinations, focusing on the impacts on the ski industry [87,88], glacier tourism [89,90], and winter sports [102][103][104].…”