On Monday, the United Nations reported findings from a ten day expedition scientists undertook in March to examine the health of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, a biome covering 10% of the world’s vital reef ecosystems. The outlook wasn’t good.
“The resilience of the [Great Barrier Reef’s] ability to recover from climate change impacts is substantially compromised,” the report said and noted that without “ambitious, rapid and sustained” intervention the world’s largest coral reef, which has experienced six mass bleaching events due to rising ocean temperatures, is in mortal danger.
The report recommended the Great Barrier Reef be added to the UN’s list of endangered world heritage sites, but Canberra has hit back at the report arguing that Australia’s current government, which took office in May, has already implemented changes the UN report recommends, such as increasing the country’s ambition to curb greenhouse gasses.
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek also said Tuesday that it was unfair for the UN to single out the Great Barrier Reef, noting that “if the Great Barrier Reef is in danger, then every coral reef in the world is in danger.”
Well, indeed.
In 2020, scientists at the University of Hawaii reported that warming waters caused by climate change, coupled with acidification and pollution, could kill 70% to 90% of the world’s reefs by 2040. The kill-off would be devastating.
“The death of reefs is as much an ecological tragedy as it is a socio-economic catastrophe,” says Sam Teicher, co-founder and Chief Reef Officer of the Bahamas-based reef restoration startup, Coral Vita.
“A quarter of all marine life depends on the reef ecosystem, while coral reefs generate $2.7 trillion annually in goods and services, through protecting coastlines from storms, sustaining fisheries and powering tourism industries,” he says.
The world has lost roughly 50% of its reef coverage since 2050, due to climate change and over fishing, and efforts to restore coral reefs have struggle to achieve the scale necessary to replenish reefs at the rate they’re declining.
Restoration efforts are falling behind for two key reasons: first, because new coral can take years to grow in the sea nurseries traditionally used for restoration efforts, and second, because many reef restoration teams struggle to secure long-term financing.
Coral Vita looks to solve the financing issue by selling reef restoration as a service to stakeholders—like seafront hotels, governments, insurers, and port authorities—who benefit economically from reefs. The company hopes its Restoration as a Service model will provide more sustainable financing than one-off grant awards, which most reef restoration projects rely on.
Coral Vita also grows its replacement reefs inside climate controlled tanks, rather than wild sea nurseries, which allows the company to more easily manage, maintain and scale its nurseries. “You don’t need to wait for good weather and swim out to check on a tank,” Teicher says.
But perhaps the most significant advantage of growing coral in tanks, as opposed to the sea, is that the water temperature can be changed to match projections of future sea temperatures, helping accelerate evolution in coral offspring to produce what Teicher calls “stress hardened” coral: reefs capable of surviving the decline in ocean viability already locked in by climate change.
“Even if we turned off greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the oceans have so much heat locked in that coral are going to keep dying,” Teicher says. “That’s why it’s essential we scale up restoration, because the cost of inaction is a lot greater than the cost of acting today.”
Eamon Barrett
greeninc.news@gmail.com
@eamonbarrett88
