Outlook Online 2009

Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority :: Over-arching research questions

Over-arching research questions

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has five over-arching research questions. These centre on how natural resource management can be improved to protect the environmental, economic and social values of the Great Barrier Reef. These questions were generated by considering the key risks to the Reef ecosystem (as identified in the Great Barrier Reef Outlook Report 2009), management options for reducing the risks and the knowledge needed to implement those options. 

Each of these questions is necessarily underpinned by other questions about condition and trends in natural resources and pressures on those resources. Delivering the answers to these questions will require several approaches, including: monitoring of key ecosystem components (including goods and services); synthesising existing research results; and effective and long term institutional arrangements for data collection and management to ensure research results are put to best use and duplication of effort is avoided.

 

Question
Why is it important?
How can we best understand and manage the cumulative impacts of multiple pressures on the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem and the goods and services it provides?
  • Increasing pressure on the Great Barrier Reef from a range of factors.
  • Few comprehensive, scientifically based sources to base increasingly frequent decisions about permitting sustainable use.
  • Effective resource management, in some cases, needs to cover large scales due to a highly connected and interdependent marine and terrestrial environments.
  • A lack of strategic status information and integrated assessments of accumulating effects.
What are the effects of existing management strategies in the Great Barrier Reef ecosystem?
  • Management agencies need to know if implemented strategies are reducing risks.
  • Requires understanding of how affected ecosystem components are responding.
  • Best done with an understanding of current condition and trends in ecosystem status, particularly in monitoring recovery after disturbance (assessment of resilience) and following management interventions (effectiveness of management).
What adaptation strategies, including improvements to current management and completely novel strategies, could be used to improve the Great Barrier Reef's resilience (particularly in the face of climate change)?
  • Assessment and priority of effectiveness of current and possible future strategies to address major to the Marine Park.
  • If future management is to reduce the forecast effects of climate change and other identified risks, innovative strategies and arrangements are essential.
  • Government and industry will need to 'think outside the square' to safeguard the marine environment - 'business as usual' is not an option.
  • Intervention may include more active restoration of existing damage to accelerate natural processes of resilience.
How can catchment and near shore management strategies (planning and decision making across all uses) in the Great Barrier Reef catchment be improved to better protect coastal ecosystems adjacent and connected to the Great Barrier Reef and to improve water quality, ecosystem health and ecosystem resilience to the Great Barrier Reef?
  • Understanding links between coastal ecosystems and their influence(s) on the Great Barrier Reef ecosystems enables all levels of biodiversity conservation to be handled at a landscape/ecosystem level where delivery of outcomes has failed in the past.
  • New planning responses are needed to prevent the incremental decline in biodiversity.
  • Key issues are poor water quality (noting agriculture is important, but not the only driver) and loss or modification of habitats in coastal and near shore areas.
  • Information would feed directly into strategic assessments on a regional scale.
How can the fisheries of the Great Barrier Reef and adjacent areas be best managed to maximise ecosystem health, ecosystem resilience and ecosystem goods and services?
  • Individual and cumulative ecological effects of the various uses of Marine Park resources must continue to be carefully assessed and managed.
  • Management responses must adapt to changing environmental and market conditions.
  • Effective management outcomes depend on integrating economic, social and environmental information and making it easily accessible.
  • Informed and responsible purchasing will increasingly drive innovations in sustainable harvesting and production methods.


 

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