In the past 12 months alone governments, regulators and industries have worked together to improve the future health of the Great Barrier Reef, and just last weekend saw the launch of the Reef 2050 long-term sustainability plan that provides a charter for the reef’s health over the next 35 years, he said.

“For the latest report, the panel relied on information from a previous dredging report commissioned by the GBRMPA and published in June 2013,” he said.

“The GBRMPA had previously said in its interpretive statement that some of the assumptions made in the report did not reflect real conditions and resulted in, ‘overestimating the dispersion of dredged material from placement sites in both the amount and distances travelled. Consequently, the sediment plume and transport maps provided in this report do not represent actual sedimentation rates or the specific extent of dredge material dispersion and migration’.”

The latest report also acknowledges that the major policy changes for future management of dredging, and the impacts of those policy changes, were out of its scope, according to Roche.

“It does illustrate, via graphs clearly showing that, since the commissioning of the report, future volumes of marine disposal of dredged material have dropped dramatically,” he said.