The only way to save coral reefs

A coral scientist calls for more "honest" messaging amid a global bleaching event.

In this underwater photo taken on April 5, 2024, marine biologist Anne Hoggett snorkels to inspect and record bleached and dead coral around Lizard Island on the Great Barrier Reef. Photo by David Gray/AFP/Getty Images.

The world’s coral reefs are in bad shape. On Monday, two major scientific bodies announced that record-breaking ocean heat is causing a worldwide coral bleaching event. It’s the fourth-ever mass bleaching event on record, and the second in the last decade. This current global bleaching is expected to be the worst ever recorded, endangering coral from the Caribbean to the South Pacific.

I’ve been following this latest mass coral bleaching with concern since Monday. And through it all, I haven’t been able to stop thinking of something one of the world’s premier coral reef scientists told me years ago.

We were chatting for a 2022 story about the world’s most climate-threatened places, which I was reporting for GQ magazine. She said that, after decades of studying coral reefs, she came to a realization: The best way to save coral reefs was not actually to be in a lab studying how they work. It was to advocate for a transition away from fossil fuels.

“The only real solution for coral reefs now”

The scientist was Julia Baum, a marine ecologist and conservation biologist at the University of Victoria. Here’s how the anecdote played out in my story:

Julia Baum, a marine biologist at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, has been researching climate-threatened coral reefs for years. But recently she decided to make a change. “I’ve realized the best way I can help to save coral reefs is not to work on coral reefs,” she says. “It’s to work on the energy transition.” That’s because climate change is caused chiefly by the burning of fossil fuels, which now accounts for 86 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. And unless we rapidly transition to clean energy, all other efforts to save corals—or our warming planet—won’t matter.

I reached back out to Dr. Baum on Wednesday to make sure she still stood by the sentiment. Two years later, her feelings were even stronger.

”Although coral restoration efforts may be able to save tiny pockets of coral reef in a few select areas, the only real solution for coral reefs now is a rapid phase out of fossil fuels,” she said via e-mail. “This is a collective responsibility. All governments, industries, and institutions must act to halt planetary warming if these enormously valuable ecosystems are to be saved.”

The problem with “super corals”

Baum’s statements are particularly important considering the mainstream messaging around coral bleaching solutions.

When you consume news about the mass coral bleaching event underway, you’ll likely read a lot about “super corals,” or scientifically-engineered reefs that can better withstand the increasing heat of the ocean. These “super corals” have become a huge area of focus for coral researchers because fossil-fueled warming has already spiked ocean temperatures to unprecedented levels.

It’s not that solutions like “cryogenically frozen reefs” aren’t important. They are, Baum said—but that’s only because they can buy some necessary time for corals until society transitions away from fossil fuels.

If society does not transition away from fossil fuels, these solutions will also fail and nearly all of the world’s coral will die. “If we push the climate system to 2 degrees Celsius, we’re talking about 1 percent of reefs surviving,” Kim Cobb, a Georgia Tech climate scientist, told me for the GQ story. “That makes it less likely that coral-resilience engineering efforts will succeed.”

“The energy transition is our best chance”

Considering the dire state coral reefs are in now, Baum said coral scientists need to start being more clear about that reality.

”What we need to face up to is that no amount of tinkering with corals—attempting to make so-called super corals—is going to save the world’s coral reefs,” she said. “The energy transition is our best chance of saving coral reefs. And as coral scientists we need to start being honest brokers about this fact.”

For her part, Baum hasn’t stopped studying corals entirely. Her research program is currently studying the reefs on Kiritimati, trying to understand how they have recovered from the 2015-2016 El Niño.

However, she said, “a huge focus of what I do now is work on climate solutions.” Most recently, she’s built a new interdisciplinary graduate training program at the University of Victoria, where students can learn about not only coral reefs, but how to implement the systemic solutions that can save them.

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Further reading:

A protester marches with a sign saying 2°C = Coral Reefs Loss at Extinction Rebellion's Carnival for Climate Justice in London. Photo by Dave Rushen/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images.

• Why do we need coral reefs? Here’s why they’re so important.
  “‘They are home to over a quarter of all marine species that we know of, even though they take up less than 1% of the ocean floor,’ … Coral reefs support the economy, too. … When coral reefs crumble away, they leave an empty, flat bottom on the seafloor …. That makes coastal communities much more vulnerable to damage from waves during storms or longer-term erosion.”
  Tampa Bay Times, August 2023.
  

• What is a coral bleaching event, exactly?
  ”When corals are exposed to stress from marine heatwaves, they spit out the algae living within their tissue, which provides them with both their color and most of their energy. If ocean temperatures don’t return to normal, bleaching can lead to mass coral death, threatening the species and food chains that rely on them with collapse.”

  CNN, April 2024.
  

• Scientists find pollutants in corals linked to burning fossil fuels

  “The discovery of these pollutants embedded in coral skeletons extend[s] over decades and paint[s] a clear picture of how extensive human influence is on the environment,” Lucy Roberts, lead author of the study and lecturer in environmental change at University College London, said in a statement. “It’s the first time we’ve been able to see this kind of contaminant in corals, and its appearance in these deposits parallel[s] the historic rate of fossil fuel combustion in the region.”

  EcoWatch, February 2024.

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