The problem is it was downgraded by the same academics who
a. clearly don't understand the reef lifecycle
b. have been predicting that the entire reef will die completely, for decades
c. financially benefit from doing so
In 2019 they were saying the reefs would take 10 years to fully grow back and might never do so, in 2022 suddenly it's grown back completely and then got even bigger.
The problem here is inherent to academia. Scientists are funded via short term grants. If you can gather all the data you need within the scope of those grants by asking grad students to tick some boxes then fine, but to be able to understand the lifecycle of huge natural systems that have been around for millions of years you apparently need more data than what they have. But if you need to collect data for 100 years before you have sufficient data to make predictions, how do you get so many grants without papers to show for it? Would it even be funded at all if not for the predictions of doom? The only field that seems to have found solutions to this is high energy physics.
