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：D。根据题干中的Robin Beaman可定位到第六段。第六段第三句为罗宾·比曼的说法：他可以证明，政府机构和其他组织付出了很多努力来试图了解这片广阔区域的生态价值。也就是说，在制定珊瑚海计划的过程中，包括政府和其他组织在内的机构付出了共同努力，D项表述与原文一致，故正确。

错项排除：原文并没有把珊瑚海保护计划与英国的印度洋保护措施进行对比，只是说对珊瑚海的保护应该比对印度洋保护的力度更大，而且这也不是罗宾·比曼的观点，故A项排除。原文第一段提到，如果提案实施，珊瑚海保护区将会成为世界上最大的海洋保护区，但这不是罗宾·比曼的看法，故B项排除。原文第四段和第五段提到渔业，但只是说到了对渔业的限制，以及渔业可能对珊瑚海保护区造成的危害，没有提到渔业的可持续性，故C项错误。