Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority

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The Australian statutory authority created by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act 1975 to manage the Marine Park, headquartered in Townsville, Queensland. Its significance for this Journey is the zoning plan: rather than protecting a small area absolutely and leaving the rest open, the Authority divides the whole park into zones with graded permitted uses, and the 2004 rezoning raised the fully protected no-take fraction to roughly a third of the park across every habitat type represented in it. That representative design — protecting a share of each habitat rather than only the scenic or convenient parts — became a widely copied template for large marine protected areas. It also marks the limit of what a park authority can do: zoning governs fishing, shipping, tourism and coastal discharge, and none of those is what causes mass bleaching. A perfectly managed park still bleaches when the water is too warm.