A United Nations emergency session on coral reefs came up short, with funding commitments well below what is needed to protect critical marine ecosystems. The Oct. 30 meeting held at COP16, the U.N. biodiversity summit, in Colombia, was underscored by recent data that show more than three-quarters of the world’s coral reefs are under threat of bleaching.
“The response has been too little and falls far short of the needs of coral nations,” Pierre Bardoux, the director of the Global Fund for Coral Reefs, said in an email statement, adding that participation from major member states and philanthropic organizations are still urgently needed.
So far, only $30 million has been committed, including a $10 million pledge from New Zealand made earlier this week. The fund hopes to raise $150 million by June 2025, when the U.N. Ocean Conference will be held.
From January 2023 to October 2024, rising ocean temperatures have subjected around 77% of the world’s reef area to bleaching-level heat stress, impacting the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a U.S. federal agency, told Mongabay by email.
“The world is witnessing its largest bleaching event on record,” Derek Manzello, NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch coordinator wrote, adding that this is the fourth mass bleaching event since 1998. The recent bleaching event has now eclipsed previous records by 11.5%, when two-thirds of the world’s reefs were impacted between 2014 and 2017.
“We’ve surpassed the previous record in half the amount of time,” he said, adding that the percentage is still increasing in size as more data come in.
Bleaching happens when extreme heat forces corals to expel the symbiotic algae within their tissues that lend them their distinct vibrant colors and up to 90% of their energy. Without the algae, corals are ghostly white and vulnerable to disease.
The sixth Status of Coral Reefs of the World report, published in 2021 by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, found that heat and other stressors had already killed 14% of the world’s coral reefs between 2009 and 2018, during the second and third global coral bleaching events.
Tropical coral reefs support an abundance of marine life and are habitat for critical protein for many coastal communities, but rising ocean temperatures and repeated bleaching events have some scientists concerned that corals may reach a tipping point beyond which they will not be able to recover.
“The world is now well aware of the existential threats and damage we’re putting on coral,” wrote Peter Thomson, the U.N. Secretary General’s Special Envoy for the Ocean. “The question is what are we going to do about it?
Banner image: A boulder star coral in St. Croix, shown healthy in May 2023 (left) and bleached in October 2023 (right). Image courtesy of NOAA.
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