Author: Ed Yong
Source: BBC Future [1]
January 10, 2013

It’s not just the Caribbean. A third of reef-building corals are in danger of extinction, and reefs the world over are in serious decline. Even Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, long held as a shining testament to careful management, has lost the majority of its coral. “Ten years ago, we thought, ‘At least we have the [Great Barrier Reef]’, but even that’s starting to look pretty grim,” says Bruno. The question now is not whether things will get worse – they assuredly will – but whether we will lose our reefs entirely.

This is a chilling prospect. To lose the reefs would be to lose the planet’s most diverse ecosystems – habitats that make even tropical jungles seem impoverished. “I’m not dissing rainforests, but you could walk for kilometres and see a thousand beetles and a hundred birds, all variations on a theme,” says Rick MacPherson from the Coral Reef Alliance. “But in one square metre of a reef, you could get every animal phylum known.”

People would also suffer. More than 450 million people live close to coral reefs and rely on them as sources of tourism revenue and protein, and as buffers that dampen the energy of incoming storms. “There are humans that depend on them for a daily basis not just as a nice place to visit for a holiday,” says MacPherson.

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