A partnership to save our Reef

Already we’re making an impact, delivering more than 100 Reef-saving projects right now, including the world’s largest coral reefs restoration program kickstarted by $100 million from the partnership.

Approaching the halfway point in the six-year partnership, here are just some of the many achievements so far.

• Delivering more than 100 Reef-saving projects, with more than 300 partner organisations.

• Commencing the world’s largest and most ambitious coral reefs program to test and deploy at-scale protection, restoration and adaptation solutions.

• Working with more than 300 landholders to improve our Reef’s water quality, limiting run-off from more than 300,000 hectares of farming land and preventing 20.5 tonnes of dissolved inorganic nitrogen and 14.3 kilotonnes of sediment from entering the Reef.

• Taking local action to save our Reef by engaging 10,000 participants in community-led Reef protection and citizen science projects, including nine local action projects that have:
- Prevented more than 27,000 pieces of litter and 700kg of other pollutants (including almost 14,000 cigarette butts) from entering the Reef.
- Planted 1,500 native trees in the Whitsundays to address erosion and water quality issues.
- Removed more than 17,000 plastic straws from local businesses.
- Produced enough reusable beeswax food wraps to replace an estimated 38 kilometres of single-use plastic clingwrap over the next 12 months.

• Caring for Country with a $50 million Land and Sea Country program co-designed and delivered by Reef Traditional Owners.

• Engaging more than 80 Traditional Owners across 35 Reef Traditional Owner groups.

• Protecting coral by coordinating the Crown-of-thorns Starfish Control Program, the largest on-Reef intervention program in Australia.

• Engaging with 43 technical experts to design a research program that will allow us to better predict, detect and respond to crown-of-thorns starfish outbreaks.

• Helping deliver the Great Reef Census, which is trialling innovative ways to capture data from across the Reef using volunteers from the community.

• Raising more than $50m in additional investment through corporate partners, philanthropy and project co-contributions. 

You can find out more about the Reef Trust Partnership, its objectives and progress dashboards here.