Home to virgin reefs, rare sharks and vast numbers of exotic fish, the Coral Sea is a unique haven of biodiversity off the northeastern coast of Australia. If a proposal by the Australian government goes ahead, the region will also become the world’s largest marine protected area, with restrictions or bans on fishing, mining and marine farming.

    The Coral Sea reserve would cover almost 990,000 square kilometres and stretch as far as 1,100 kilometres from the coast. Unveiled recently by environment minister Tony Burke, the proposal would be the last in a series of proposed marine reserves around Australia’s coast.

    But the scheme is attracting criticism from scientists and conservation groups, who argue that the government hasn’t gone far enough in protecting the Coral Sea, or in other marine reserves in the coastal network.

    Hugh Possingham, director of the Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions at the University of Queensland, points out that little more than half of the Coral Sea reserve is proposed as a ‘no take’ area, in which all fishing would be banned. The world’s largest existing marine reserve, established last year by the British government in the Indian Ocean, spans 544,000 km² and is a no-take zone throughout. An alliance of campaigning conservation groups argues that more of the Coral Sea should receive this level of protection.

    “I would like to have seen more protection for coral reefs,” says Terry Hughes, director of the Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Queensland. “More than 20 of them would be outside the no-take area and vulnerable to catch-and-release fishing”.

    As Nature went to press, the Australian government had not responded to specific criticisms of the plan. But Robin Beaman, a marine geologist at James Cook University, says that the reserve does “broadly protect the range of habitats” in the sea. “I can testify to the huge effort that government agencies and other organizations have put into trying to understand the ecological values of this vast area,” he says.

    Reserves proposed earlier this year for Australia’s southwestern and northwestern coastal regions have also been criticized for failing to give habitats adequate protection. In August, 173 marine scientists signed an open letter to the government saying they were “greatly concerned” that the proposals for the southwestern region had not been based on the “core science principles” of reserves—the protected regions were not, for instance, representative of all the habitats in the region, they said.

    Critics say that the southwestern reserve offers the greatest protection to the offshore areas where commercial opportunities are fewest and where there is little threat to the environment, a contention also levelled at the Coral Sea plan.

解析：A。根据题干中的scientists’ argument和Coral Sea proposal可定位到原文第三段。该段指出，该计划受到了科学家和环保组织的批评，他们认为政府对珊瑚海或者其他沿海区域网中海洋保护区的保护工作都做得远远不够。A项表述与原文一致，has not done enough对应原文中的hasn’t gone far enough，故为正确答案。

错项排除：科学家们只是认为澳大利亚政府的保护力度不够，并不是说保护措施无法改善保护区的状况，故B项排除。原文中没有提及关于征求意见草拟提案的表述，故C项排除。原文第七段提到，海洋科学家联名致信政府，说提议没有以“核心科学原则”为基础（had not been based on the “core science principles”），D项利用此内容进行干扰，但文中“core science principles”并不是对生态系统的调查，故D项错误。