Earthscan Oceans
2 total works
The Great Barrier Reef is located along the coast of Queensland in north-east Australia and is the world's largest coral reef ecosystem. Designated a World Heritage Area, it has been subject to increasing pressures from tourism, fishing, pollution and climate change, and is now protected as a marine park. This book provides an original account of the environmental history of the Great Barrier Reef, based on extensive archival and oral history research.
It documents and explains the main human impacts on the Great Barrier Reef since European settlement in the region, focusing particularly on the century from 1860 to 1960 which has not previously been fully documented, yet which was a period of unprecedented exploitation of the ecosystem and its resources. The book describes the main changes in coral reefs, islands and marine wildlife that resulted from those impacts.
In more recent decades, human impacts on the Great Barrier Reef have spread, accelerated and intensified, with implications for current management and conservation practices. There is now better scientific understanding of the threats faced by the ecosystem. Yet these modern challenges occur against a background of historical levels of exploitation that is little-known, and that has reduced the ecosystem's resilience. The author provides a compelling narrative of how one of the world's most iconic and vulnerable ecosystems has been exploited and degraded, but also how some early conservation practices emerged.
Coral reefs are hotspots of biodiversity, but are under threat from ocean pollution and acidification, as well as human activities such as fishing and tourism. This book provides a global environmental history of coral reefs, which will provide greater understanding of environmental change and management of coral reefs over time. It describes the range of impacts of human activities in different coral reef systems, highlighting the timings and trajectories of change in various regions.
It also examines the implications of the main environmental changes in coral reefs over the historical period for adjacent environments, societies and economies. The author then sets out the implications of an environmental history of coral reefs for notions of resilience, vulnerability and phase shifts in relation to these ecosystems. The scope of the book is global, although with a focus in particular on those coral reefs for which extensive literature exists and which represent environments and habitats of international significance, such as the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, the coral reefs of the Caribbean and Red Seas, and some of the reefs of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.