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As the UNESCO World Heritage Committee convenes this week in Busan, South Korea, to deliberate on the long-term future of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, environmental campaigners have launched a high-profile public campaign across the coastal city to pressure global and local fast-food chains over their links to deforestation that threatens the natural World Heritage site.

Last week, UNESCO’s cultural branch upheld a draft ruling that opted against adding the 2,300-kilometer reef to the organization’s “in danger” list, a decision that Australian federal authorities framed as a validation of years of investment and policy reform to protect the ecosystem. Last year, the Australian government passed sweeping legislative changes that introduced federal oversight of land clearing in the reef’s river catchment areas and established the country’s first-ever National Environmental Protection Agency, capping off years of back-and-forth negotiations between Canberra and UNESCO.

But environmental organizations have pushed back against claims of sufficient progress, arguing that the Australian government must speed up and expand conservation reforms, while also holding major food corporations accountable for their role in accelerating ecosystem decline. Campaigners argue that beef suppliers for major fast-food brands are directly tied to large-scale land clearing in the reef’s catchment zones, where deforestation for cattle grazing drives sediment pollution that damages fragile coral habitats.

To amplify their message during the week-long committee meeting, campaigners from Australian and global environmental groups have blanketed Busan – a city of more than 3 million residents – with attention-grabbing advertisements, including subway signs, bus shelter billboards, and even a flying blimp. The most viral of these ads parodies McDonald’s iconic golden “M” logo and famous slogan “I’m lovin’ it”, reworking it to read “I’m killin’ it with Aussie Beef” alongside a graphic of bleached coral. The modified slogan, printed in both English and Korean, appears across all campaign materials deployed across the city.

Kristin Urquiza, senior adviser for global environmental organization Mighty Earth, explained that the campaign targets McDonald’s alongside other major chains including Burger King and South Korea’s homegrown leading burger brand Lotteria, noting that 70% of McDonald’s locations worldwide – including those in South Korea – source Australian beef. South Korea is the third-largest market for Australian beef by value, trailing only the United States and China, with roughly one-third of all beef consumed in the country coming from Australian farms.

“Land clearing for grazing is the single biggest driver of sediment pollution that harms the Great Barrier Reef, and companies buying beef from cleared reef catchments are part of that harmful supply chain,” Urquiza said. “Australia has never met its own domestic targets for cutting sediment pollution flowing onto the reef, so corporate action is critical to driving change.”

Environmental experts confirm that deforestation in catchment areas that drain into the Great Barrier Reef releases large volumes of sediment into the marine ecosystem, which smothers coral and degrades critical inshore reef habitats. Data collected by the Australian Conservation Foundation shows that between 2018 and 2023, more than 856,700 hectares of forest and woodland were cleared in the reef’s catchment zones, 84% of which was cleared to make space for cattle grazing. The Burdekin and Fitzroy catchments alone – with the Fitzroy ranking as Australia’s second-largest sea-draining basin – dump more than 4.9 million tonnes of sediment into the reef’s waters every year.

Nathaniel Pelle, deforestation expert at the Australian Conservation Foundation, added that while a majority of Australian cattle producers prioritize responsible land stewardship to protect threatened ecosystems, a small minority continue clearing native forests that undermines the collective effort to protect the reef. “Every burger, sausage and steak sold by major retailers and chains should come from Australian producers that have committed to zero deforestation,” Pelle said.

McDonald’s has previously framed Australia as a high-priority market for its deforestation-free beef procurement policy, alongside other major beef producing nations including Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay. In its official policy, the company states that it has collaborated with producer groups for years to “better understand and address the links and drivers between beef production, deforestation and conversion”.

For its part, the Australian government has welcomed UNESCO’s recent decision not to list the reef as in danger, with Environment Minister Murray Watt saying the ruling recognizes “Australia’s strong collaboration and ongoing efforts to protect the reef”. “While challenges like climate change remain significant, today’s recognition demonstrates that Australia’s long-term investments, strong management and governance frameworks and collaborative approach are delivering tangible results,” Watt said. “We will continue to build on our comprehensive suite of actions, leverage strong partnerships, and utilise our world‑leading reef management to support the Great Barrier Reef’s resilience into the future.”

Since 2014, the Australian federal government and the Queensland state government – which jointly manage the reef – have invested more than $5.3 billion in conservation initiatives. The Great Barrier Reef is one of Australia’s most important economic assets, supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs and contributing roughly $9 billion annually to the national economy. Alongside the Great Barrier Reef assessment, the World Heritage Committee is also set to discuss this week the Statement of Outstanding Universal Value for Australia’s recently inscribed Murujuga Cultural Landscape, a sacred Indigenous site in Western Australia home to tens of thousands of ancient rock engravings.

Along California’s sunbaked Pacific coastline, a quiet ecological crisis is unfolding beneath the waves, driven by an extended marine heat wave that has already begun reshape marine life patterns and threaten vulnerable species. As climate change amplifies extreme ocean warming and overlaps with a projected record-breaking El Niño event, scientists and conservationists are sounding the alarm over cascading harm to coastal ecosystems.

Sara Lesser, a 39-year-old naturalist at Long Beach’s Aquarium of the Pacific, has witnessed the shift firsthand during daily whale-watching excursions. This summer, she told AFP, the playful pods of dolphins and pods of whales that once drew tourists to the waters are increasingly hard to find. Rising surface ocean temperatures have pushed the small schooling fish that cetaceans depend on — anchovies and sardines — to retreat to deeper, cooler waters or migrate much farther north than their typical ranges. With their food source gone, whales and dolphins have followed, leaving fewer sightings for onlookers and signaling a far larger disruption to the coastal food web. For Lesser, the drop in encounters is not just a disappointment for tourists; it is an early warning sign of more systemic damage underway.

Data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirms the severity of the current warming event: surface water temperatures along California’s coast are currently 3 to 4 degrees Celsius above the long-term average, and the heat wave has persisted for roughly six months, according to NOAA research oceanographer Andrew Leasing. What makes this event particularly worrying is its overlap with a developing El Niño, the climate pattern that warms equatorial Pacific surface waters and alters global weather systems. Scientists project this El Niño could rank among the strongest ever recorded, potentially outpacing the destructive 2015–2016 event that devastated California’s marine ecosystems.

That 2015 event, which followed an earlier marine heat wave that started in 2014, offers a grim preview of what may come. Thousands of seabirds starved when fish moved out of accessible surface waters, and the bodies of emaciated sea lions and whales washed up on public beaches. Today, early signs of the same collapse are already appearing. In recent months, dozens of dead pelicans and cormorants have been recovered near San Diego. One of California’s most iconic native species, sea lions, face growing risk: Leasing explained that warming waters force female sea lions to abandon their pups to travel farther for food, leaving young pups to starve. Additionally, higher ocean temperatures fuel the growth of toxic algal blooms that produce domoic acid, a neurotoxin that accumulates in anchovies and sardines, which then poison marine mammals that eat them. In early June, two juvenile humpback whales washed up dead on the shores of Monterey Bay from domoic acid poisoning — a mass poisoning event so large it has not been seen in a decade, according to Elliott Hazen, an adjunct professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “These are such large predators, it just highlights how much domoic acid there has to be in the ecosystem for it to affect them,” Hazen told AFP.

The ecological shift is also bringing unexpected changes to human activity along the coast: warming near-shore waters have pushed juvenile great white sharks much closer to shore than is typical, as younger sharks prefer warmer temperatures. Recent months have brought multiple high-profile encounters: a Malibu resident filmed a great white swimming just meters from unsuspecting children playing in the surf, and Huntington Beach was forced to close swimming areas three times this spring after aggressive sharks were spotted close to shore, putting beachgoers on edge.

Marine heat waves along California have become an annual event since 2019, and experts warn that these anomalous conditions will become the new norm if current warming trends continue. “We know that climate change is adding more fuel to the fire,” Hazen said. The long-term risk extends far beyond iconic marine mammals: repeated heat waves erode the ability of coastal ecosystems to sustain the fish populations that both wildlife and human communities rely on for food. “If we have these marine heat waves over and over again, and we lose the ability to sustain the ecosystem the way we have in the past, we’re going to lose some of the fish species that we rely on for food. So that’s the big concern,” he added.