This funding plan extends over nine years for projects including improving water quality, conserving the reef and supporting around 64,000 tourism jobs comes just months before this year's federal election. The plan has been criticized by scientists and environmental groups for failing to address climate change.

The world's largest coral reef ecosystem has lost more than half of its coral populations in the past three decades due to warming oceans, and has faced massive coral bleaching in recent years. Morrison said the pledge would expand his government's investment in the Reef 2050 Plan to more than $3 billion.

The independent Australian Climate Council issued a statement on Friday likening the government's reef plan to putting a "band-aid on a broken leg".

"If you don't deeply reduce emissions this decade, the state of the reef will get worse," Professor Lesley Hughes, a climate scientist and professor of biology at Macquarie University, said in the statement.

"Any additional funding for the environment in Australia is welcome as it is very underfunded. However, handing out money for the Great Barrier Reef with one hand, while funding the very industry - fossil fuels - that is generating devastating climate impacts such as marine heatwaves and coral bleaching, is adding to the very problem they claim they want to solve," Professor Lesley Hughes said.

Martin Zavan of Greenpeace Australia accused the government in a statement of "ignoring the number one driver" of the decline of the Great Barrier Reef: "climate change caused by burning fossil fuels".

The Australian government is due to brief the United Nations in a few days on its plans to protect the reef, notes the BBC.