Australian airline Qantas has partnered with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation as well as committing A$10 million ($6.5 mln) over 10 years to roll out what it described as world-first coral restoration technology, it announced Thursday.
The two organisations launched a new fund that will help accelerate the restoration of Australia’s reef systems, including investment in coral IVF, heat tolerant corals, and world-first portable coral nurseries.
Qantas said it would invest the cash into the Reef Restoration Fund to support scientists, Traditional Owners, and local tourism operators restoring corals across the Great Barrier Reef and other coral reefs across Australia.
“Australia is the guardian of some of the most iconic coral reefs in the world. It’s a huge responsibility and we’re proud to see one national icon supporting another,” Great Barrier Reef Foundation Managing Director Anna Marsden said.
“This partnership will help fund critical actions at a critical time.”
While Marsden noted that global coral reefs cannot adapt fast enough to warming temperatures, she said more advances in coral reef restoration science had been made in the past five years than in the past five decades.
“Over the life of the partnership we’re committed to finding opportunities to share these learnings with Australia’s other coral reefs,” she said.
In the first two years of the new partnership, the fund will focus on projects including Boats4Corals – a programme that trains local tourism operators, Traditional Owners, and researchers in the novel coral restoration technique known as Coral IVF, and launch it in new reef locations.
Other projects will include pioneering new solutions that will help coral reefs resist, adapt to, and recover from ocean warming temperatures, as well as the Reef Seed programme, that creates world-first portable coral nurseries in shipping containers.
The nurseries can grow and plant 100,000 corals each year, and the fund will support an acceleration of coral deployment, the two entities said.
The Reef Seed programme is being developed by the Australian Institute of Marine Science.
Qantas Chief Sustainability Officer Andrew Parker said the partnership was a key element of the airline’s Nature Action Plan, also announced Thursday.
The plan includes the commitment to set nature-related targets and publish Taskforce for Nature Related Financial Disclosures by the end of FY 2025.
“It’s part of our commitment to address nature and biodiversity loss by reducing the impact of our operations and supply chain, supporting the broader restoration of nature and advocating for cross-sector transformation,” Parker said.
“These commitments are just the first step. We are also developing rigorous nature-related targets and plans on how we’ll achieve them, which we expect to release by the middle of next year.”
According to the plan, Qantas conducted its nature interaction assessment last year, uncovering risks and opportunities both in its direct operations and its upstream and downstream value chains.
The assessment helped the airline develop a targeted nature strategy to address its most material impacts and dependencies, according to the plan.
It follows Qantas last year establishing a A$400 mln fund to invest in climate-related projects and initiatives, with a focus on sustainable aviation fuel.
By Mark Tilly – mark@carbon-pulse.com
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