Australia, Great Barrier Reef

This guide has been written to inspire and empower reef managers and community leaders to develop reef stewardship programs. Stewardship is a way of empowering local communities to take a more active role in sustaining the natural resources on which they depend.

The Great Barrier Reef outlook report 2014 provides an overview of the current condition, use, factors influencing the condition, management effectiveness, resilience, risks to its future and likely outlook. For the first time, the report also specifically considers the Region's heritage values, including Indigenous heritage, historic heritage and the area's world heritage values.

This book provides an original account of the environmental history of the Great Barrier Reef, based on extensive archival and oral history research. It documents and explains the main human impacts on the Great Barrier Reef since European settlement in the region, focusing particularly on the century from 1860 to 1960 which has not previously been fully documented, yet which was a period of unprecedented exploitation of the ecosystem and its resources.