From Reef Conservation to Climate Leadership – In Conversation with Tony Fontes

Climate change can be difficult to grasp at a global scale, but on the Great Barrier Reef, its impacts are increasingly visible. For those who have spent decades in and around the Reef, the changes are impossible to ignore. We spoke with Climate Reality Leader and long-time Reef conservationist Tony Fontes, whose four decades of experience have given him a first-hand perspective on the changing health of one of the world’s most important ecosystems. 

From witnessing the escalation of coral bleaching to shifting his conservation work towards climate action, Tony reflects on what the reef has taught him about effective climate leadership, the importance of science-led decision-making, and the responsibility to think beyond political and electoral cycles.

He also shares what Australia can learn from Pacific climate leadership, why oceans need to be at the heart of climate policy, and where he continues to find hope in the resilience of the reef and the people working to protect it.

What first motivated you to join the Climate Reality Leadership Training, and how has it influenced your career and personal perspective since?

I have always been a bit of a reef conservationist, but that’s what happens when you dive the reef. But the real motivation to go the next step came in 2011-2012. 2011 brought us the Gladstone Port dredging disaster and 2012 brought us UNESCO threatening to put the Reef on the in-danger list. These events were a real wakeup call for me. Up until that point, I had never realised how much pressure was on the reef. It was not indestructible.
 
I began looking for new opportunities for training that would enhance my ability to fight for the Reef. Fortunately, in 2014, Climate Reality was running a training program in Melbourne. And, as they say, the rest is history.
 
The Climate Reality Leadership Training certainly influenced my conservation work. The training on the program was both valuable and effective, the information learned was powerful.

As noted by UNESCO in 2012 and emphasised in the Climate Reality Training, climate change is the greatest threat our natural (and human) environment is facing. The back-to-back mass bleaching events in 2016-2017 made me realise that the reef is the canary in the coal mine.

Tony Fontes at Hardy Reef. Image provided by T. Fontes, July 2026.

My conservation work quickly shifted to climate change. As we all now know, if we exceed a global temperature increase of 2 degrees C, coral reefs as we know them today, will no longer exist.

I still work with other reef threats such as poor water quality and unsustainable fishing practices. These are home-grown problems with home-grown solutions which will help build reef resilience, which is important in the face of climate change.

After 40 years working on the Great Barrier Reef, what changes have you witnessed that have had the greatest impact on you? 

There is no happy answer to this question. But it has been an interesting journey. For me, the deterioration of the reef’s health started slowly in the 1980s but has picked up speed over time, particularly from 2016 to the present, over which time the reef suffered 6 mass bleaching events, the latest in 2025.
 
There is no doubt that the mass bleaching events have had the greatest impact on me (and probably every other reef diver/snorkeler). The severe events are hard-hitting and relatively quick. The corals look fine at the beginning of summer but are bleached and dead by the end of summer. All within a few short months. There is absolutely nothing one can do except watch the corals die. It is heart wrenching. 

How has your firsthand experience of climate change shaped your understanding of what effective climate leadership looks like? 

I don’t think that there is anything mysterious about what effective climate leadership looks like. Most importantly, it is science-led and honest about the scale of the problem. We must distinguish between:

• what we know;
• what remains uncertain;
• what risks are unacceptable;
• and what action is required despite uncertainty.

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Good climate leadership tells the truth about both the problem and the consequences of inaction. At the same time, effective climate leadership creates hope without creating false optimism and must give people a reason to believe that action is worthwhile. And finally, effective climate leadership means making today's decisions in the interests of people and ecosystems that do not yet have a seat at the table, future generations.

With the Pacific playing such an important role in the global climate conversation, what do you think Australia can learn from Pacific leadership

I think Australia has a great deal to learn from Pacific climate leadership. Perhaps the most important lesson is that we must treat climate change as a matter of survival, not political convenience.
 
For many Pacific communities, climate change is already experienced through sea-level rise, coastal erosion, extreme weather, threats to food security and damage to marine ecosystems. The Pacific therefore tends to approach climate policy with a much stronger sense of urgency.

We must also learn to think in generations rather than election cycles. There is a powerful Pacific concept of responsibility to future generations. The Pacific Islands Forum describes the ocean as an inheritance from ancestors that must be cared for and passed on. 

​This concept provides a real challenge to Australian politics, where climate policy can become trapped in three- or four-year political cycles. Our decisions and policies must be based on the question: "What Australia are we leaving to our grandchildren?" That changes how we think about infrastructure, energy, reefs, forests, water, fisheries and regional development.

Given your experience on the Reef and in the Pacific, what role do you believe oceans should play in shaping climate policy and action?

Oceans should be at the heart of climate policy, not treated as a victim of climate change. From my experience on the Great Barrier Reef and across the Pacific, it is clear that the ocean is both one of our greatest climate regulators and one of the clearest indicators of how rapidly the climate is changing.
 
The ocean absorbs enormous amounts of heat and carbon dioxide, moderating the rate of climate change, but this comes at a cost, warming, acidification, coral bleaching, sea-level rise and changes to marine ecosystems. The Reef makes those global processes visible at a local scale (the canary in the coal mine). 

In the Pacific, the consequences are even more immediate: climate change affects food security, livelihoods, cultural identity, coastal communities and, in some places, the very habitability of islands.
 
Climate policy needs to consider both the land perspective and a whole-of-ocean perspective. 

Tony Fontes at the Climate March in Brisbane in 2014. Photograph provided by T. Fontes, July 2026.

Ocean health should be treated as a fundamental component of climate resilience and national security, rather than simply an environmental issue.

After decades of witnessing environmental change, what gives you hope for the future, and what do you think needs to happen next?

What gives me hope is that, after decades of witnessing change on the reef, I’ve also seen how much people can achieve when they care deeply about a place and work together to protect it.
 
I’ve seen young people become passionate advocates for the environment, tourism operators change the way they operate, and communities come together to take stewardship of the reef.
 
The reef has shown remarkable resilience and this also gives me hope. I have seen reefs smashed by coral bleaching or crushed by a cyclone build back over time to their former glory. However, this resilience should not be mistaken for an unlimited capacity to absorb damage.

OCEANIA II. Photogrpah provided by T. Fontes, July 2026

What needs to happen next is that we have to move from talking about climate action to delivering it at the scale and speed the problem demands. Protecting the Reef cannot be separated from addressing climate change. We need much stronger action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while continuing to improve water quality, protect coastal habitats and give the Reef the best possible conditions to recover.
 
Just as importantly, we need leadership that is prepared to think beyond political and electoral cycles.  

We need governments, industry and communities to make decisions based on the long-term health of the environment and the generations who will inherit it.