CITIZENS OF THE GREAT BARRIER REEF
“The actions of people across the planet will define the future of the Reef”.
Andy Ridley
CEO of Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation
Founder of Earth Hour
PROFILE
Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef is a 21st century conservation organisation. Combining leading science with meaningful citizen action and digital innovation drives our highly scalable model and connects people from across the Reef and beyond to achieve significant conservation outcomes.
Our collaborative team brings a diverse range of expertise, from the founder of global climate movement Earth Hour, to award-winning developers, world-leading coral reef scientists, Emmy Award-winning cinematographers, shark experts, Traditional Owners and salty sea dogs who have dived the Reef for decades. Headquartered in Cairns, we’re a broad church driven by our collective passion to protect the place we love for future generations.
OUR WORK
Stretching 2,300km in length, less than 5% of the Great Barrier Reef is regularly surveyed and as much as 40% has never been surveyed. As the impacts of climate change accelerate, there is an urgent need to better understand how the system is being impacted year-on-year and to utilise the Reef community in its conservation.
In one of our flagship projects, the Great Reef Census successfully mobilised a makeshift research flotilla of tourism boats, dive liveaboards, research ships, private vessels, superyachts, fishing charters and even a tug boat to reach and survey over 170 priority reefs, with some in remote locations 200 nautical miles offshore. The world’s first Great Reef Census succeeded in capturing large-scale reconnaissance data and ground truthed modelling across a range of priority and ‘key source reefs.
The project did not stop with the reef community, over the following three months, thousands of volunteer citizen scientists from across the planet joined researchers in analysing images brought back from the Reef. With over 30,000 image analyses completed, the Great Reef Census is an example of a new conservation model in action.
SAPPHIRE IMPACT
With impacts of climate change and other threats accelerating globally, there is an urgent need to scale-up conservation efforts in order to address the enormity of the challenges we face. The Sapphire Project will support our ambitions to massively scale-up the Great Reef Census and open source our learnings and platform to other reef communities across the planet. The data captured will help to fill critical knowledge gaps, support reef research and management and ultimately, help to advance conservation outcomes for the Reef.
Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef is a registered charity and is endorsed as a Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR1) by the Australian Taxation Office
ABN 77 614 807 564