UN heritage body Unesco has recommended that the Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest marine park off the Australian coast, should not be included in the World Heritage danger list, even as conservationists describe the outlook for the reef as “poor”, a media report said on Friday.
The Unesco draft report says that Australia must implement a plan it submitted to the UN body in 2015 outlining that how it would address the threats to the Great Barrier Reef, which was given World Heritage status in 1981, BBC reported.
Environmental organisation Greenpeace in a statement said the report was “not a reprieve — it is a big, red flag from Unesco”, BBC said.
The final decision on the status of the reef, which spans 348,000 sq km and contains 2,500 individual reefs, will be made at the World Heritage Committee meeting in Germany next month.
Earlier, conservationists in a 2014 report had warned that the condition of the reef “is expected to further deteriorate in the future”. They had listed climate change, extreme weather conditions and pollution as key concerns.
However, in 2015, Australia submitted a plan to Unesco that included a proposal to reduce sea pollution by 80 percent before 2025.
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