Coral Reefs are Dying: Who is Next?

   Coral Reefs are Dying:   

         Who is Next?

M.A. Dworkin

     Caribbean Sea - As the Department of Planning and Natural Resources celebrates Coral Week in the USVI, by hosting a number of engaging events, the worldwide consensus of opinion seems to be we are killing off the planet one species at a time, with coral reefs in the early gunsights of the effects of climate change.

     Think of Coral Reefs as the caged canary being led into the coal mine to act as an early warning system to detect poisonous gases like carbon monoxide and methane. Likewise, Coral Reefs are widely considered one of the first and most vulnerable ecosystems to be dying from climate change. Many scientists recognize them as having passed a major climate “tipping point,” experiencing “widespread dieback” due to their extreme sensitivity to rising water temperatures which is occurring at such a rapid rate it does not allow coral reefs time to recover between bleaching events.

     Coral Reefs are highly biodiverse underwater ecosystems built by colonies of tiny animals (polyps) that create hard calcium carbonate skeletons, often termed “Rainforests of the Sea.” They cover 1% of the ocean floor but support 25% of marine life, roughly 1 million species, offering food and shelter for fish, mollusks, sea urchins, and turtles while providing coastal protection as natural breakwaters, absorbing up to 97% of wave energy, from the storms that wallop the shorelines of the Caribbean Islands. Without coral reefs, coastal communities would face increased flooding, storm surges, and rapid erosion.

     Losing coral reefs would trigger a catastrophic collapse of marine biodiversity, destroying habitat for 25% of all ocean species. This would cause major fisheries to crash, fish populations to collapse, and endanger the food sources for 500 million people. It would also eliminate potential medicinal resources (many medicines including treatments for cancer and viruses are derived from reef organisms) not to mention the damaging effects on tourism throughout the Caribbean region.   

     It’s not as if we have not had plenty of early warning about the effects of climate change on our planet. In 1856, American scientist Eunice Newton Foote first demonstrated the heat-trapping ability of carbon dioxide (CO2) and hypothesized about its impact on climate. In 1896, the Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius warned about the effects of  carbon dioxide in a paper entitled “On the influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air upon the Temperature of the Ground.” 

     In his research, Mr. Arrhenius estimated that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would raise the global temperature by 5-6 degrees centigrade. He recognized that burning coal, oil, and natural gas released into the atmosphere would significantly warm the planet. 

     In1938, British engineer and  meteorologist Guy Stewart Callendar published a landmark paper demonstrating that land temperatures had increased 6-10% over the previous half-century, and that this warming correlated with an increase in atmospheric CO2, caused by human activities involving fossil fuel combustion. Although Mr. Calendar’s calculations of global temperature rise proved extremely accurate, his theory on CO2 was largely dismissed by the scientific establishment at the time, who believed that human activities could not impact the planet’s climate on such a large scale.

     Fast forward to the 2020s, where thousands of scientists and all major scientific bodies throughout the world claim unequivocally that climate change, brought on by the continuing increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, has profoundly and negatively affected coral reefs and all sorts of other atmospheric phenomena. 

     In 2026, it is estimated that up to 50% of the world’s coral reefs have been lost since 1980. In 2023 - 2025, a cataclysmic Global Bleaching Event impacted roughly 84% of the world’s reefs, representing the most severe bleaching on record. Coral Bleaching is a stress response where corals expel symbiotic algae living in their tissues, turning them white and leaving them vulnerable to starvation and disease. It is primarily caused by rising ocean temperatures due to climate change. It is not immediately fatal, but prolonged heat stress causes mass coral death. 

     The consensus indicates that if global warming reaches 1.5 degrees centigrade (which we are just below) above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900), experts warn that 90% of tropical coral reefs could disappear by 2050. While some reefs show resilience, the speed of climate change currently outpaces the natural ability of many coral species to adapt. 

     Climate change acts alongside other threats like pollution and overfishing, which had already caused a reduction of 50% of global living coral cover since 1950.

     “We are the first generation to feel the effect of climate change and the last generation who can do something about it.” 

• Barack Obama