Articulating futures: Community storylines and assisted ecosystem adaptation in the Great Barrier Reef

Public discourse about the Great Barrier Reef – a globally significant coral reef system stretching 2300 kilometres along the coast of northeast Australia – has become dominated by forecasts of its decline due to climate change. While a common and understandable response to fears about the Reef’s imminent loss is advocacy for stronger action on climate change, there have also been increased calls for a shift toward resilience-based management supported by technological interventions to help coral ecosystems survive and adapt to inevitable temperature rises. This paper explores how local community perspectives are formed and expressed within this broader dialogue. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 80 people living and working in proximity to the Reef, we use composite narrative maps to illustrate how narratives of the Reef’s imminent loss are used by communities to articulate alternative futures in the possibility of social change and in the ongoing efficacy of local protection and care. However, we also show how these narratives of loss can constrain the articulation of responses to technologically assisted adaptation, forcing the majority of participants into an uncomfortable moral binary between offering practical help to an imperilled Reef or allowing its imminent loss to catalyse social change. We reflect on what this might mean for fostering a productive and inclusive dialogue about assisted ecosystem adaptation in the Great Barrier Reef. • We explored how communities articulate the future of the Great Barrier Reef and options for its management. • Community storylines are assembled in a dialectic between narratives of inevitable loss and alternative possibilities. • A perceived impasse between action on climate change, local care and protection, and scientific interventions is evident. • More productive engagement is needed to enrich the connections imagined between these possibilities.