Protecting The Great Southern Reef

Melissa takes us offshore to the reef, with it’s giant kelp forests teeming with sea life.  Her research is on human/nature relationships, so while we know it faces threats from human activity and climate change, which behaviours can we influence to help conserve the reef?  How do we encourage people to protect a natural feature they are unlikely to visit? Appeal to those who live close by? Vote for politicians committed to conservation?

Melissa explains the challenges and risks and identifies behaviours that could have the most impact; repeated behaviours, one-off behaviours and our connection to nature (even when we can’t see it).

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Pocket Change is a series of pocket-sized videos about a key aspect of behaviour change. Each episode features a BehaviourWorks Australia Researcher explaining their area of expertise in a clear and simple manner. Grab a coffee, press play, and enjoy Pocket Change.

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Transcript:

Geoff

Hi everyone. This month I'm talking to Melissa Hatty about her work with the Great Southern Reef.  Melissa, tell us about the Great Southern Reef.

Melissa

So the Great Southern Reef is a 8000km stretch of coastline around the south of Australia. It goes from sort of the centre of WA, right down around the border down the south coast up to the New South Wales/Queensland border. And it's temperate reef. So it's mostly kind of rocky outcrops and kelp forests.

Geoff

I didn't know it was there. And when you brought this up atone of the functions that we have at BehaviourWorks Australia, a lot of the people in the room didn't know it was there. So that's a behavioural problem, isn't it? Tell us about the task in terms of us looking after nature if we can't see it.

Melissa

This is the interesting thing. So the Great Southern Reef, because it's such a big stretch of coastline, there is lots of work being done to look after the reef in various ways, but it's done quite sporadically.

So different universities - in New South Wales, they'll be doing some work, in Tassie, they'll be doing some work in WA, they'll be doing some work, but they haven't sort of pulled it together. And so we're now part of this great Southern Reef Research Partnership that's aiming to kind of pull it together a little bit better so that we can actually start looking at the 8000km stretch of coastline kind of as a whole.

And you touched on an interesting thing in terms of how do we connect people to something that they've never seen. So my research has been around human / nature relationships and part of the way that we often try to connect people to nature is actually spend time in it. So we say, you know, get out there and smell the flowers and touch the grass and do all of those sorts of things.

But when we're talking about a) a very long stretch of coastline, and b) something that people will potentially never see. So it's kind of, you know, up to a couple of kilometres away from the coast, it's underwater. People might never get to see it. And so part of the challenge that we're having, from a behavioural science perspective, is how do we get people to care for something and connect with something that they will never experience?

And so the research partnership, there's kind of two main teams, so the ecology team, they’re the guys that put on the wetsuits and dive under the water, and the social ecology team are the ones that are trying to address this sort of behavioural science idea of getting people to know about the reef, because, as you say, most people have never heard of it, and then to do something, to actually try to protect the reef,

Geoff

So why is the Great Southern Reef important and why do we need to protect it?

Melissa

Historically, a lot of the, I suppose press coverage has gone towards the Great Barrier Reef. We know about coral reefs, we know about, you know, the great threats to the coral reefs based on climate change, particularly. The Great Southern Reef is kind of like the little poor cousin that's never kind of got the coverage.

But the Great Southern Reef is important for us for so many reasons. From a climate change perspective, those massive kelp forests sequester so much carbon. The diversity of biodiversity within the area is incredible. Something like 80% of the of the species are endemic, so they're found nowhere else in the world.

And one of the challenges with this area is as climate change happens and as the waters get hotter, we're finding a lot of species are migrating because they're trying to find cooler areas. But the mere geography, the geography of the area, they've got nowhere else to go. So part of the challenge we've got is, well, how do we address some of these threats?

Because it is so important, important in the sense of the biodiversity, and the carbon type issue. But even from a financial perspective, I think the estimate is about $10 billion a year towards the economy based on things like tourism, fisheries. So when we get all the seafood, a lot of it comes from that area. And so there's economic impacts of not looking after the reef as well.

Geoff

Are you in the middle of a series of, kind of political landmines in terms of dealing with people's opinions about the reef, their ownership of the reef, who's responsible for it?

Melissa

It's a really good question. We are looking specifically at the moment in the social ecology team, we're trying to understand what the key risks to the reef are. And when we start to develop, a kind of a behavioural intervention to get people to do more to protect the reef, we'll base it on those risks.

But part of the challenges is, as we said in the beginning, it's such a long stretch of coastline, and the risks can be anything from something like climate change, which there's kind of not a behaviour that's going to address climate change. But a risk might also be, plastic pollution, or it might be people that go out on fishing boats are leaving the fishing line behind.

And so political in the sense of trying to understand not only the individual level behaviours, but also the kind of structural behaviours. And what can we actually influence? What can we leverage? So the partnership, the research partnership is about trying to get more people involved, more people to protect, more people to kind of do stewardship type behaviours, to look after the reef.

Geoff

Tell me about the Great Southern Reef Research Partnership.

Melissa

The partnership is universities that are kind of based along the reef. And so it's being led by the University of Tasmania. Monash University are involved, also BehaviourWorks, various other universities that are around in sort of New South Wales and in WA as well. But it's also, not-for-profit - NGOs are involved, as well as managers. So parks managers and local government departments. And we also got funding from the Ian Potter Foundation. And it was established to try to bring together the science to try to get a more consolidated, framework, I guess, to look after the reef.

Geoff

So it's a huge task you're trying to get people to, in a sense, take ownership of or care for something that they cannot visit physically. Most people can't visit. What's the plan? How do you go about doing this?

Melissa

We're taking a multi-stage process, multi-stage, research plan. The first is to go to the literature is we academics always do and to try to understand, what are the risks to the reef? What are the actions that are currently being done? We know that there are people that live along the reef that are already looking after it.

So we want to understand who are those people, what are they doing? And then if we can understand what are some of the key actions and behaviours that we want people to do, we can then think about how can we get more people to do those things? And so we're looking at, asking people who actually live along the reef, as well as other people in Australia, because we don't necessarily want to assume that you have to live in Tasmania in order to look after the waters around Tasmania.

And so we're going to do, a community population survey to try to get an understanding, firstly to find out who knows about the reef, because as you said back in the beginning, most people have never heard of it. I hadn't heard of it when I started. And then to try to understand what people are currently doing, what they're willing to do, and then we'll try to sort of set this up into a prioritisation process to then work out what are some of the key actions we need to encourage. And then time permitting, we'll actually develop some kind of an intervention to see if we can get those actions to actually happen.

Geoff

So this sounds like a giant challenge. Tell me about the challenges and the task you have ahead of you.

Melissa

So there's quite a few issues that we've kind of come up along the way because the reef is so big, 8000km. One of the questions that we've got in our collective minds is, are the risks the same? So are the people, the things that are threatening the reef in New South Wales, the same as those that are threatening the reef in Tasmania or in WA? As well as the stewardship behaviour. So we know people are out there protecting it, but are they doing the same things and is the same thing relevant across the whole reef?

And the other issue is we only have a limited amount of time. So quite often these interventions take years and years, sometimes decades, but with a limited pool of funding for a limited period of time, we've got to try to turn over as much as we can to address some of those questions quickly. And it sort of becomes how to kind of scale this down into something manageable.

We're thinking if people actually live by the coast and they have a certain kind of, ownership. So there's a concept called place attachment where people are kind of connected to a particular place, and the people that live there, do they have a different view of the reef than someone who might only visit it once a year? Because the stewardship behaviours, how they care for it might be different. So maybe the people on the reef are out there already doing things that they think are protecting the reef. But maybe it's the tourists that come in once a year are actually doing the damaging stuff.

Geoff

And one of the barriers would be because it's so big, who owns it? Is there a magic line between New South Wales, Victoria and SouthAustralia? There isn't, of course.

Melissa

When we're thinking about different behaviours, sometimes they're kind of immediate, behaviours that happen on the spot, so things like picking up rubbish off a beach. Sometimes the behaviours are a little more distant, so voting for a politician that has a particular environmental policy, for example.

Another distinction with behaviours is sometimes there are once-off behaviours such as voting and sometimes they're a repeat behaviour. And they're what we're trying to tease out at the moment. You know, which behaviours for which audience, in which context. Repeat behaviours, once-off behaviours and how can we determine what's going to be the most useful behaviours that we need to encourage in people?