The world’s largest-ever ongoing — fourth global coral bleaching event (GCBE4) which started in January 2023 — is still in progress, and scientists claim that it woud take another year to fully assess the extent of destruction.
Even reefs once considered relatively insulated from climate extreme — known as thermal refugia — such as Raja Ampat reefs in Indonesia and the Gulf of Eilat in the Red Sea, are now under threat and showing signs of bleaching, according to DownToEarth
In Florida, the coral cover has declined 21% from 2023 to 2024, while some areas in the Great Barrier Reef report up to 44% coral mortality due to extreme heat stress, reported DownToEarth.
While scientists are actively collecting data on the effects of extreme heat stress, long-term underwater surveys are critical to understand the full scale of coral mortality. “The global scale perspective will still be a year or two away,” Derek Manzello from NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch told DownToEarth.
Restoration Efforts Falling Short
A study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution by researchers at the University of Helsinki warns that coral degradation is significantly outpacing restoration efforts.
According to Mongabay, restoration projects often fail due to high costs, poor site selection, lack of global coordination and recurring bleaching events caused by rising water temperatures.
“Scaling up restoration to any meaningful level going beyond the very local scale would be extremely challenging,” senior author Giovanni Strona, now a quantitative ecologist at the European Commission in Italy, told Mongabay.
Sebastian Ferse, a senior ecosystem scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Germany, who wasn’t involved with the study, told Mongabay that its results suggest “reef restoration is prohibitively expensive, particularly when looking at the scale of the problem we are facing.”
“It is much more cost-efficient to prevent degradation of reefs in the first place than having to restore the damage afterwards,” Ferse said.
With reefs facing unprecedented stress globally, experts are urgent climate action to preserve one of the most diverse biodiversity ecosystems on the planet.
