Reading the signs

FEW of us will ever be accepted into a club that boasts Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton as former members, but it’s an honour Malcolm McCulloch will have bestowed on him this month when he officially becomes a fellow of The Royal Society.

The University of Western Australia-based geochemist is being recognised for his research into coral reefs as an indicator of the effects of global warming and farming practices on the marine environment.

“It’s international recognition by probably the oldest and most distinguished society,” Mr McCulloch says, adding that he feels humbled by his new fellowship status.

Mr McCulloch started his career as a geoscientist, but found himself drawn to biology and coral reefs later in his career.

“More than 15 years ago I started getting more interested in recent problems, environmental problems so then I started to work on coral reefs,” he says.

“I was always keen to do something that I thought was important, that I thought would affect people. I was working on the (Great) Barrier Reef and I was able to show that corals show a record of all the additional runoff to the reef from when settlement started … you could see in these corals the different signals that were telling us about the different sediment and nutrients coming in and affecting the reef.

“Most recently we have been working on this climate change problem … ocean acidification, which is where the oceans are taking up CO2 and they are changing their carbonate chemistry.”

The Royal Society fellow says his research is hard evidence that climate change is a reality.

“These things then can be used to change some of the policies with land use, trying to encourage farmers to have better practices. The CO2 work is still ongoing but we hope we can better understand the limits of how much CO2 we can put in to the oceans,” Mr McCulloch says

His love for the marine environment was nurtured during his childhood in Busselton, where he spent much of his time on and in the water.

“We used to go sailing and live on the water, of course. My love for the water, my love for the marine environment basically comes from times when I used to go sailing and swimming in the Geographe Bay I guess,” he says.

After leaving university with an undergraduate degree in physics, Mr McCulloch moved to the US where he completed a PhD at California Institute of Technology, and then moved to the Australian National University in Canberra as a post-op in 1980.

He returned to Perth only a year ago to work on the Ningaloo Reef through his position at UWA.

“I came back to WA partly because I grew up here but also to work on the reefs here. From those reefs, I think, we’re going to learn a lot more,” Mr McCulloch says.

“Once we get this hard evidence, we can make strong cases and prove to people that coral reefs really are at risk and we really have to strive to keep our levels of CO2 not going above certain levels.”

While he believes reefs should be protected from harmful CO2 levels, Mr McCulloch doesn’t advocate restricting public access to reefs.

“Reefs shouldn’t be cordoned off, people should get to see them. The people who are your strongest advocates for making changes to what society does are people who have seen some of these coral reefs. So if you provide opportunities for people to see these reefs, they get to appreciate them. You can do it sensibly without disturbance,” he says.

Having been involved in environmental work of this type for the past 15 years, Mr McCulloch says he has seen a shift in public opinion on the environmental impact of farming practices and global warming.

“The change that’s happened, people do accept a lot more the evidence that there are definitely things changing and being affected on the inshore reefs from what we’re doing on our sugar farms and other farms,” he says.

State and federal governments have now put caps on the acceptable levels of sediment run-off from farming – a decision based on some of Mr McCulloch’s work.

“I have just added the final nail in the coffin, people knew this was happening, they had a pretty good feel for it and what I provided was the final bit of hard evidence that was pretty much undisputable,” he says. What are you most proud of in your career?

The work on the coral reefs, which is what I am talking about all the time. Being able to quantify some of the human impacts on coral reefs.

What is the most important message about coral reefs as an indicator of climate change?

If we can actually say to people, if you go above 450 parts per million these reefs will no longer exist, and you have to make choices, we have the methods now and techniques for different energy uses, we have to because these corals are like the canary in the coalmine.

What has been your biggest career challenge?

Moving from the traditional earth sciences to the more environmental biological issues of coral reefs. I am still a novice about lots of things to do with corals. It’s been a bit of a high-risk activity, (but) I have never worried too much about failing. Some things didn’t work but we have had a number of successes and that has paid big dividends.

What is the one thing that needs to be done to curb climate change?

We have to start taking measures to reduce the amount of CO2 emissions so we start to stabilise the levels of CO2.