Germana Carillo According to satellite data, as many as 77% of the world's coral reef areas, from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, have so far been subjected to heat stress responsible for bleaching, as climate change fuels record ocean temperatures across the globe. world
The Reef is experiencing its second major bleaching event in 2 years. In March 2017, Greenpeace Australia Pacific is bearing witness to this tragedy and calling on Governments everywhere to take action against coal.
Since February 2023, there has been an unprecedented mass bleaching of coral reefs across the world, ranging from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Indian Oceans. An alarming 77% of the coral reef areas are now hit due to the extreme heat stress that promotes this devastating phenomenon commonly referred to as bleaching, where coral reefs and their entire ecosystems die.
This year, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in April, sounded the alarm by announcing officially that a global bleaching event had started, marking only the fourth recorded event since 1998. A record-breaking bleaching from 2014 to 2017 blackened almost 66% of the world’s coral reefs.
“This event continues to grow in spatial extent, and we’ve already beaten the previous record by over 11% in just about half the time,” said Derek Manzello, coordinator of NOAA Coral Reef Watch. “This may be a tipping point for many of these coral reef systems in terms of the ultimate response of these coral reefs to bleaching events.”
How coral bleaching affects ocean ecosystems
It is a breakdown caused by thermal stress in warming oceans, where the corals eject the vivacious algae that live inside their tissues. The starved coral then becomes pale and highly vulnerable to starvation and disease. Bleached coral is not dead, but it can become irreversibly damaged if the ocean temperatures do not cool.
Already, the mass bleaching is the most widespread on record, affecting coral reefs in 74 countries and territories. So far, NOAA has stopped short of labeling it the “worst” on record. Over the coming months and years, scientists will conduct underwater assessment of coral mortality to help measure the severity of the damage.
“It is likely that this will be a record in terms of impacts,” Manzello said. “We have not ever seen a coral bleaching event of this magnitude before.”
In the wake of this record-shattering bleaching, a special emergency session on coral reefs-a first-is being called by scientists, which is to take place later this month in Colombia during the COP16 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity summit. Leaders from across the world are expected to discuss plans to avert the functional extinction of coral reefs, including greater protections and funding.
