As the UN Ocean Conference convenes in Nice, France from 9–13 June 2025, global delegates are grappling with the mounting pressures facing the world’s oceans – habitat degradation, pollution, biodiversity loss, and the destabilising impacts of climate change.
On the opposite side of the world, Norfolk Island – a tiny Australian external territory – offers an uncomfortable preview of what is unfolding elsewhere. Our small inshore coral reef lagoon is, in effect, an early warning system: small enough to observe detailed changes, and simple enough to trace many of the drivers of degradation with clarity.
Here, disease outbreaks, growth anomalies (coral ‘cancers’), declining water quality, and nutrient-driven algal blooms are progressively dismantling the reef’s ecological structure – much as they are elsewhere, but on a scale that makes the processes starkly visible. Years of neglect, deferred decisions, and unmanaged land-based runoff have contributed directly to the poor water quality now driving these changes. Norfolk’s reef shows us not only what is happening, but how quickly these shifts can occur when stressors are left unchecked.
This week, alongside the global discussions in Nice, I will post a daily series of photographs and observations documenting these changes as they have unfolded over the past five and a half years. Norfolk Island’s reef may be small, but it is a living case study – a microcosm of what many other coastal ecosystems may soon face unless serious, funded interventions are made.
The warning signs are already here. The question is whether we choose to act.
DAY 1 – How Quickly the accepted ‘Normal’ Changes on A Reef
Today is World Ocean Day – the perfect moment to launch this week-long blog series on Norfolk Island’s reef, which I’m running alongside the UN Ocean Conference kicking off tomorrow in Nice, France. Over the coming days, I’ll be sharing examples of the pressures facing our reef right now – but also, the warning signs they offer for reefs everywhere.
I want to start with something that happens quietly, but is at the heart of how coral reefs decline: shifting baseline syndrome. This is the idea that, over time, we forget what ‘healthy’ used to look like. Each generation resets its expectations based on what they first encounter – even if that state is already degraded.
The photos I’m sharing today show how quickly this kind of shift can happen. In late January 2022, I first noticed the bright white patches of white syndrome starting on a Montipora coral bommie. Within just two months – by the end of March 2022 – the entire coral had died. It was startlingly fast. Since then, algae has steadily colonised the dead skeleton, covering the bommie in a thick layer that leaves no space for baby corals (planulae) to settle and start rebuilding.
This is how a coral reef shifts – not necessarily through one catastrophic event, but through small, steady losses that accumulate, one bommie at a time. If you swam past that same coral today, you might not even give it a second glance – it simply looks like another algae-covered patch of reef. But that’s the danger of shifting baselines: we stop noticing what we’ve lost.
As coral reef researcher Professor Callum Roberts puts it:
‘It renders each new generation blind to past losses, setting their personal baseline of normality by what they first find.’
The big question is: do we let this become our new normal? If we continue allowing high nutrient levels to enter our waterways – through household products, agriculture, livestock, failing septic systems, and poor waste management – these algal takeovers will keep repeating. But if we take water quality seriously, we can tip the balance back. With lower nutrients, algae loses its advantage, corals get the space they need to recruit, and the reef has a chance to regenerate.
In the end, it comes down to this: how much do we care about protecting what’s left of our reef?
