Africa: When Coral Reefs Die, Coastal Communities Pay the Price

Mombasa, Kenya — For decades, the outlook for the coral reefs has been increasingly bleak.

Corals are some of the world's most biodiverse ecosystems, which have faced an existential threat due to rising temperatures that cause increased incidences of bleaching. This makes it inevitable that reefs will experience rapid decline. However, scientists' latest findings seem to paint a slightly different picture regarding the survival prospects of reefs.

Dubbed "the rainforests of the sea", the coral reefs occupy less than 1% of the ocean floor yet are home to up to 25% of marine life. Millions of fish and other species live, feed, and reproduce in and around the reefs. Notably, reefs are essential to people since they protect shorelines from flooding due to storms or tidal waves. They are global ecosystems whose value extends to sustaining the lives of many millions of people.

However, over the past decades, the planet has lost 50% of its reefs. Many corals in the world have been affected by the effects of global warming. Today, more than 80% of the world's reefs are experiencing bleaching stress due to rising ocean temperatures. According to Earth org, during 2023 and 2025, together with the strongest El Niño effect ever recorded, which caused never-before-seen atmospheric and ocean temperatures, heat stress at bleaching-levels impacted nearly 84% of the Earth's total coral reef coverage area across over 83 countries and territories. This particular event has been classified as the fourth global mass coral bleaching event and the second within the last ten years.

Moreover, fishing activities, pollution from the land, building developments, and shipping activities have all contributed to the decline.

It is estimated that the widespread distribution of coral reefs able to survive or even recover after the influence of climate change is approximately three times higher than previously assumed. 50 Reefs Plus, a scientific project designed to identify key coral reef sanctuaries that would survive and adapt to climate change. The research drew on more than 45,000 coral surveys and decades of climate and ocean data to produce what its authors described as a global map of coral refugia: the places most likely to persist as the planet warms.

This study, which was released during the Our Ocean Conference in Kenya through the collaboration of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Macquarie University with the help of the Bloomberg Ocean Initiative, represents an important step forward for determining which reefs could potentially withstand further increases