The Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP) is the world’s largest program looking at new ways to help the Great Barrier Reef (Reef) and reefs worldwide adapt and recover from climate change.
Climate change requires global action. We are accelerating our actions now to protect the Reef and build its resilience to minimise the impact of climate change.
Recent program breakthroughs are helping to better support the Reef. They include:
- semi-automated and robotic methods to mass produce corals and year-round coral propagation methods
- the acceleration of heat tolerance of several coral species in the lab
- seeding devices engineered to deliver these coral babies en masse to reefs in a way that enhances survival in their vulnerable first year
- cryopreserving over a trillion coral sperm which are ready to be thawed and used to re-populate damaged reefs
- the development of new models which vastly improve our ability to predict where interventions are best deployed and how well they will function
- building prototypes for fogging and cloud brightening machines that can shade corals from heat and light intensity and could reduce the impact of heatwaves.
This shows how utilising the latest science and Australia’s increased investment is helping to protect and build the resilience of the Reef.
“These breakthroughs are game changing as they are designed to be applied at scales of thousands of square kilometres – completely transcending current notions of coral reef repair, which are mostly done by hand on a few square metres of reef”, said Dr Cedric Robilot, Executive Director – Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program.
The Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program is funded by the partnership between the Australian Government’s Reef Trust and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation (GBRF).
Partners include the Australian Institute of Marine Science, CSIRO, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, The University of Queensland, Queensland University of Technology, Southern Cross University and James Cook University.
