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Tour operators who have the wonder of herbs, already suffering from climate change, have been shaken by the pandemic. The lack of is bad for them and for the reef.
By Livia Albeck-Ripka
Photographs through Natalie Grono
CAIRNS, Australia – Diving under the ocean, Russell Hosp swam to the limestone bed of the Great Barrier Reef, where he placed chunks of blue deer horn coral. With the tourists gone, he filled the void with this small act of conservation, which made him the dubious long term on earth.
“It’s a little surreal,” hosp, a reef guide, said, about spending hours at sea without the company of the usual enthusiastic visitors themselves. Aboard the silent catamaran, he said, he learned how much the coronavirus “changed the world.”
The pandemic temporarily made an imminent cost to the tropical city of Cairns, the reef’s main gateway and the base of The Hosp and many others whose livelihoods depend on it.
Tour operators there were already fighting the belief that the reef is dying, as warming the waters causes repeated massive bleaching that has harmed many corals by its bright colors. But where climate change has been a growing risk to the survival of the reef and thus to the energy of tourism in Cairns, the coronavirus has dealt a hammer blow.
But this city, so connected to the wonders of nature off its shores that life can hardly be believed without visitors arriving en masse, has been forced to face the prospect of not relying more on tourists.
Foreign and local lers, already discouraged by last summer’s devastating wildfires and now blocked by Australia’s domestic and foreign bans, have disappeared, and a $4.6 billion industry built around the world’s largest housing distribution has stopped.
The sudden disappearance of visitors is even more unrealistic as the virus itself has slightly affected Cairns: the city of 150,000 in the far northeast of Australia has recorded only a few dozen cases, and lately none.
But it’s to escape the success of the pandemic.
“We had never stopped running before: the global currency crisis, terrorist attacks, airline strikes; call it, the global has introduced it,” Hosp said. “We don’t know if we’ll ever get back to normal.”
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