The outlook report said the reef was a source of livelihood for hundreds of thousands of people, making a significant contribution to the state and national economy. It found that a healthy reef improved the mental and physical health of people who interacted with it, and contributed to Australia’s national identity.

Damage to the reef, it said, harms those who value it: “The flip side of strong place attachment and well-being attributed to reef connection emerges as ‘ecological grief,’ manifested when reef health declines.”

“Ocean warming, sea level rise, and ocean acidification are projected to worsen in the coming decades,” the report said. “Although reef ecosystems are resilient and can recover from impacts, increasing instances of widespread coral bleaching are exceeding the tolerance limits of reef organisms to climate change.”

The six warmest years for sea surface temperatures on the Great Barrier Reef in the past 400 years have occurred since 2016, according to an Australian study. Highest ocean heat in four centuries puts Great Barrier Reef at risk, published this month.

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations body for assessing global warming, has found that if average global temperatures – currently 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial averages – rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius, 70 to 90 percent of the world’s coral reefs will die. If warming reaches 2 degrees, the IPCC predicts that 99 percent of coral reefs will die.

Lissa Schindler, the Australian Marine Conservation Society’s Great Barrier Reef campaigner, said the Albanian government needed to take more action to reduce emissions, matching global measures that would keep warming to 2 degrees.

“Measures to address climate change were assessed as ‘ineffective’ (in the outlook report), while measures to address major local threats, poor water quality and fisheries were assessed as only partially effective,” Schindler said.

Biodiversity Council member and coastal ecosystems expert at the University of Queensland, Professor Catherine Lovelock, said that alongside climate action, the best thing governments can do is invest in protecting wetlands and revegetating banks and channels to reduce sediment runoff from farmland. These things improve water quality and help the reef recover.