On Thursday 1 August 2024, the long overdue 2022 Scientific Consensus Statement on the Great Barrier Reef was released.
Its two-year delay coming partly because of organisations (including AgForce) prosecuting the case that a flawed and imbalanced 2017 statement it replaces had not helping communities and industry in always finding common ground on water and environmental issues critical to the future viability of communities and industry in reef catchments.
AgForce acknowledges the much broader and deeper considerations placed in the 2022 statement (compared to the 2017 statement) which included inputs from 78 authors, 69 reviewers and evidence from over 4,000 publications.
With this finally released it is back to the long form advocacy and policy work with one of the first pieces being seeking the intent of political parties at state and federal level leading into the elections. We doubt we'll see any substantive move on policy settings this side of the elections (good or bad), but the next terms of government both federal and state will be important for reef related matters.
