# Capture — 50 per cent

- **Claim filed:** “Coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef has declined by 50 per cent in just 27 years.”
- **Who:** CSIRO (citing De’ath et al. 2012)
- **URL:** https://www.csiro.au/en/research/natural-environment/oceans/ereefs-management-system
- **Date on page:** eReefs project from 2012; sentence still live 2026-08-14
- **Publisher:** CSIRO
- **Title:** Ensuring a vital future for the Great Barrier Reef
- **Captured:** 2026-08-14
- **Method:** saved HTML (`csiro-50.html`)

## Verbatim (CSIRO)

> Coral cover in the Great Barrier Reef has declined by 50 per cent in just 27 years.

Footnote 1 is De’ath G, Fabricius KE, Sweatman H, Puotinen M (2012), *The 27-year decline of coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef and its causes*, PNAS.  
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1208909109

## The same paper’s second sentence

De’ath et al. attribute that 1985–2012 loss:

- tropical cyclones ~48%
- crown-of-thorns starfish ~42%
- bleaching ~10%

## The other meter

Senate inquiry (Ridd) — see `evidence/2024/greatest-threat/senate-ridd.html`  
Ridd: cyclones primarily responsible; some society papers skipped the 2011–2016 recovery after Yasi.

`aims-2022.html` — northern 36%, central 33%, regional highs in the 36-year record.

`aims-2026.html` — northern 35.1%, still above the 27% long-term average.

## What this file does not do

It does not file “no coral died.” It files the 50 without the storms against a later record high in the same government series.