Marine parks and reserves

Western Australia is blessed with a long and varied coastline and an abundance of marine life, from majestic whale sharks to tiny corals. The mainland coast of Western Australia is about 13,500 kilometres long and there are 12.6 million hectares of waters under State management (compared with one million in New South Wales). The State also has a multitude of islands (there are 3424 features above the high water mark on 1:100,000 maps).

Our marine areas are also significant in a global context. Western Australia is regarded as one of the world's biodiversity hotspots for coral reefs: a recent study placed our west coast second (behind southern Japan) in terms of its numbers of endemic species (the Gulf of Guinea, the Great Barrier Reef and the Hawaiian Islands were ranked third, fourth and fifth respectively). Apart from the remote oceanic islands of Lord Howe Island, St Helena and the Easter Islands, Western Australia's coastal waters were also considered to be amongst the most ‘pristine' in the world.

The Western Australian coast boasts a big area of biogeographic overlap, between the tropical north (north of North West Cape) and the temperate south (east of Cape Leeuwin), where tropical and temperate species co-exist. The Indian Ocean is also the only ocean in the world that has an eastern boundary current (the Leeuwin Current) that transports warm waters from the equator to the southern coast of a continent. Hence, the Abrolhos Islands off our central west coast have extensive coral reefs at a latitude well outside the tropics - an astounding but fortunate anomaly.

To comply with and meet the obligations in national and international agreements and conventions, a National Representative System of Marine Protected Areas is being developed by the Commonwealth and all of the Australian States and the Northern Territory. Central to this work-and similar to that underpinning the terrestrial reserve system-is the idea of a Comprehensive, Adequate and Representative (CAR) reserve system.

A comprehensive marine conservation reserve system is one in which all major bioregions have marine reserves within them. In WA, 18 major bioregions have been identified and the CAR system will eventually consist of a network of marine reserves throughout the State (see map). Adequate refers to the number, size, configuration and level of protection of the reserves within a bioregion - a few very small reserves are not truly sustainable in the long term, especially in the ocean where currents and other conditions create a high degree of connectivity between different areas. The reserves also need to be Representative of the ecosystems within the bioregions. This means that all species of plants and animals found in Western Australian waters will be represented somewhere in our marine reserve system.

When the system is complete, WA's marine reserve system will be like a 'string of pearls' around our coast, with our marine jewels protected in marine parks and marine nature reserves.