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“Fighting back, glorious, wonderful, and thriving.” Great Barrier Reef Foundation Managing Director Anna Marsden’s statement could apply to either one of McLaren Racing's or the Foundation’s aims.

Whilst we’re targeting our return to glory on track, we’ve teamed up with the Great Barrier Reef Foundation as part of our sustainability ambitions, who are helping the coral reefs “fight back” against climate change.

Based on the northeast coast of Oscar’s home country, Australia, the Great Barrier Reef is one of the world’s Seven Natural Wonders, and it’s easy to see why. Spanning 344,400 square kilometres, it features the world’s largest collection of coral reef species (400), 3,000 individual reefs, 980 islands and over 1,600 species of fish.

It is breathtakingly beautiful and can even be seen from space, but offers so much more than looks alone. It is the largest single-structure made of living organisms on the planet and provides essential habitats for giant clams, manta rays, sharks, whales, dolphins and turtles, among many other sea creatures.

The coral reef ecosystem’s benefits are vast: it supports healthy fishing industries, protects coastlines from the elements, absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and is a source of income for the Australian economy through tourism.

However, it has been and remains under serious threat from climate change, with rising water temperatures, pollution and more severe cyclones among the various factors damaging the reefs.

The Foundation was established in response to a mass coral bleaching event in 1998, in which one in 12 of the world’s corals were destroyed. There have been a further four since, with the most recent even impacting areas of the reef that were previously thought to be safe.

Coral bleaching occurs when coral comes under stress from a lack of nutrients, increased temperatures, or light. This causes the coral to lose symbiotic algae and photosynthetic pigments, becoming transparent and leaving the coral at risk of starvation and diseases.

For over two decades, the Australian non-profit has been working to reverse this process, focusing on scaling solutions that restore and enhance the resilience of coral reefs and ocean habitats.

“We do two things very simply: we bring people together to find the solutions and deliver them at scale so that the Reef will be around for our kids,” Anna continues. “Climate change isn’t selective: the entire system is vulnerable.

“Coral reefs, naturally, have an inherent resilience - they've been fine for centuries. They haven’t needed us, but gosh, we’re needed right now… What has happened through climate change is that the corals no longer have a recovery window. The only way to increase that recovery window is through intervention – humans working with Mother Nature.”

Why are McLaren involved?

We’re committed to achieving net zero by 2040, and an ambitious target such as this will require substantial effort. Reducing our emissions alone simply won’t cut it. We need to get out there and get our hands dirty, using our status as a globally recognised sports team with racing and engineering expertise to support projects we truly believe in, which make a real difference.

To this aim, we’ve set up the Climate Contribution Programme, which utilises the McLaren Accelerator programme to support high-quality organisations, including the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, in removing existing carbon from the atmosphere and restoring damaged ecosystems.

McLaren Accelerator is our in-house team of experts whose innovation and insight from their experiences in racing is used to help our partners overcome challenges in their respective sectors. As part of the Climate Contribution Programme, they’re supporting the Great Barrier Reef Foundation to accelerate large-scale coral reef restoration, working with marine scientists to optimise their setup.

“I know that Formula 1 and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation sounds like quite an unusual partnership, but it's a really great story,” McLaren’s Director of Sustainability Kim Wilson explains. “One of our team was watching a documentary one evening and saw the Great Barrier Reef Foundation featured. They were using cable ties to attach coral fragments onto frames and plant them in the ocean, and it really intrigued him. He contacted them, started a conversation, and it all went from there.”

Before our involvement, the project had already enjoyed plenty of success, working with groundbreaking engineering equipment and technology, but it simply isn’t big enough to cope with the demands of the Great Barrier Reef.

It’s hoped that McLaren Accelerator can help the Foundation scale up its work in all areas, but specifically in production, and push it towards its ambitious target of planting two million corals in the Reef by 2025.

“At McLaren Racing, we're uniquely placed to help accelerate climate solutions,” Kim continues. “Motorsport is at the forefront of innovation, technology, and manufacturing, so we have an amazing opportunity to use our platforms to accelerate and scale up these solutions.

“We’re the only team to race across five different race series, which gives us a fantastic opportunity to take cross-learnings and best practices from each. We have an incredible fan base and platform to raise awareness, as well as an incredible partner ecosystem. When you put people from different backgrounds in a space like sustainability, you can really innovate.”

Oscar’s influence

Oscar remained in Australia following his home Grand Prix, where he’d finished fourth, making the 1,300-mile trip from Melbourne to Hayman Island, off the coast of Queensland. The 23-year-old joined the Great Barrier Reef Foundation to snorkel at the Reef, where he was shown the impact of climate change and the work they’re doing to restore the stunning natural landmark.

It’s a topic unsurprisingly close to Oscar’s heart, given that the Great Barrier Reef is a source of great pride for Australia. As one of the country’s famed sporting exports with a global platform, the Australian feels a responsibility to play his part in helping to protect them.

“This is very important to me, trying to help protect and preserve one of our most famous parts of nature and one of our most beautiful,” he explains. “We have a massive platform to be able to do good in the world, so we can go about a lot of change.

“We have a lot of great engineers, a lot of great people, and a lot of great partners at McLaren, so if we can try and help out in the world, outside of racing, that is a great thing for us to do, and an important thing for us to do.”

Playing our part

Like in Formula 1, when it comes to tackling climate change, every second counts. If treated in time, coral can be fully restored, but if left in this bleached state, it is unlikely to survive. This means that the Foundation have just a short window of time to save the Reef, before the damage proves beyond repair.

Using their current technologies, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation selects corals that they believe are most likely to survive in the future and helps them reproduce. The Foundation uses devices that it says will allow for large-scale diver-less deployments to plant on the reefs.

On average, Dr Cédric Robillot, Executive Director for the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Programme, says the Foundation and other similar organisations produce around 20,000 of these corals globally every year. However, this only covers a tiny portion of the Reef, which is roughly the size of 70 million football pitches. For context, during his snorkel on the reef, Oscar covered an area around the size of a tennis court, which isn’t even among the Reef’s most inflicted.

The Great Barrier Reef Foundation team need to multiply that number by several hundred, if not thousands, in a short space of time with limited resources – an ambitious but necessary target.

“The next six months of this partnership will be about improving our automation processes,” Dr Cédric Robillot explains. “For example, designing a machine that will allow us to increase the reliability of our processes and the volumes. In the longer term, it’s making sure that we can replicate these solutions and also transfer them to local communities in Australia and around the world.”

Using our own technologies, we’re working to speed and scale up the process, whilst simultaneously making it more cost-effective.

“Engineers from within our programme are talking to engineers from McLaren, and they bring a completely different perspective,” Cédric continues. “They’re used to working to very, very tight timeframes under pressure, delivering key objectives in a very transparent and accountable way. For us, that’s been fantastic.”

Anna adds: “Essentially, the partnership with McLaren Racing gets us to our destination faster. We’re in a race against time and scale. On our swim, we only saw a fraction of this system that is so big, and we’ve just seen our fifth mass coral bleaching event, so we cannot sit around.

“We've gone to the fastest brand on the planet and said: ‘How do we get there faster?’ It’s a marriage of skills, mindset, and passion, working to solve something that falls on our watch, but we will get there, and this will get us to the podium at the end.”