I don't know. If there is no money that get infused into the local environment around the corals then less people will work to fix it. It is also rather well established that conservation must focus on awareness or things don't usually improve by them self. Comparing the drawback to the benefits of tourism, I suspect the benefits win.
>If there is no money that get infused into the local environment around the corals then less people will work to fix it.
The ocean has warmed to the point where to coral cannot survive. The reef is H-U-G-E (1,400 miles long according to the article). If there was a technology capable of reducing the ocean temperature around the reef, the waste heat the technology would create would cause more problems elsewhere.
The reef is an indication that the global warming problem has become to big for human technology to fix.