Plan To Lock Up 30 Per Cent Of Barrier Reef Nearly a third of the Great Barrier Reef will be protected from fishing and trawling under a new plan to be announced by the Federal Government today. ... [The executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Don] Henry said the Government needed to deal with climate change, which he said was another big threat to the reef's long-term survival. "They could ratify the Kyoto protocol and ensure that Australia becomes a world leader in efforts to tackle climate change, because that's the biggest threat to the reef in the future," Mr Henry said.

Climate change is kind of a cliched example of a globally-interconnected environmental issue, but the juxtaposition here highlights one of the pitfalls of current environmental management. We tend to think of patches of land (and socio-cultural groups, which gets us into a discussion about saving minority cultures) as independently self-sufficient, affected mostly by endogenous characteristics. But the connections between places can matter just as much. It's becoming less and less possible to wall off areas and let them go their own natural way.