It’s not news that the Great Barrier Reef needs our help. Just in the past five years, warming waters due to climate change have caused three major bleaching events. But there are those working on simple and accessible for people to take action from anywhere in the world. In this piece, Founding CEO of Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef and Co-Founder of Earth Hour Andy Ridley explains why the Great Reef Census project is so critical and how an engaged global community can make change happen.

The Great Barrier Reef is an extraordinary place. However, like coral reefs globally, it’s under increasing stress from climate change and has experienced three mass bleaching events in the past five years. But it’s massive – 2,300km long – so the impacts are not uniform and what we’re seeing is truly a patchwork, ranging from healthy reefs so beautiful they fill you with awe, to reefs badly degraded by bleaching, cyclones or crown-of-thorns starfish — and everything in-between. This is why we need a Great Reef Census.

The Great Barrier Reef is the same size as Germany, so the scale is enormous. Therefore, the challenges, not just in marine conservation, are also enormous. If we want to scale up our efforts, we need to think differently about conservation and utilise every asset available, whether that’s using tourism boats as research vessels, or recruiting citizen scientists to analyse survey images. We need to design the 21st century, shared-economy version of a conservation organisation – the Great Reef Census and Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef as an organisation are striving to do this.

In late 2020, we gathered a vast group of tourism and dive boats, superyachts and fishing vessels. Our collective research mission was to capture thousands of survey images from across the Great Barrier Reef. The team spent the best part of 11 weeks capturing that data. The next stage of this work is engaging a global community to help analyse them.