Coral reefs are powerful yet vulnerable ecosystems, rich in biodiversity but increasingly at risk in a changing world. Here at the Coral Reef Alliance, our team advances science to assess the adaptive capacity of corals, protect diverse reef networks, and restore marine ecosystems by influencing management and policy decisions. Our research shows coral reefs can adapt to climate change, but this requires the establishment of large, diverse, and well-connected reef networks.
Through scientific research, we work to understand how coral reefs can adapt in the face of climate change and translate our findings into data-driven solutions.
Why We Assess
Coral reefs support coastal communities, act as natural barriers against storm surges, and are critical to marine biodiversity. However, they are severely threatened by pollution, unsustainable fishing, and climate change, with predictions that almost all coral reefs could be lost by 2050 if current trends continue.
CORAL recognizes that climate change is a profound challenge for reefs and that reducing greenhouse gas emissions will be key to their survival.
However, though climate change is a global problem, strategic local protection is still critical to maximizing the probability of coral reef survival and recovery. Through actionable science, we strive to understand how to make this possible and provide tools to enable climate-smart reef protection across the globe.
Our Science
Over almost a decade of scientific research, CORAL and its partners have shown that protecting connected networks of genetically diverse reefs is critical to ensuring their survival and recovery.
Genetic variation is the fuel of evolution. Organisms with genes that are best adapted to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce, sending their unique genetic code on to the next generation. This process is known as natural selection. Over multiple generations of natural selection, species can evolve, displaying new traits and characteristics. And the more genetically diverse a population of organisms is, the more likely some of those individuals will be able to adapt to whatever circumstances arise. It’s this idea that is essential to coral reefs surviving the heat stress created by climate change.
Through simulating coral reef survival under different climate scenarios, we’ve shown that genetically diverse coral reef networks are much more likely to survive warming waters than their less diverse counterparts. Our research has also found that genetic connections between coral reefs (e.g. via currents that carry coral larvae) are crucial to their prospects because genetic exchange, especially from reefs that are already adapted to high temperatures, can enhance the odds of resilience.
These findings present us with a few key implications for how we can help corals survive warming oceans.
First, we must reduce carbon emissions and slow the rate of climate change to give corals a fighting chance. Second, we must protect a diversity of reefs that are themselves genetically diverse. Doing so increases the odds that heat-adapted individuals will be present and naturally selected. Third, we can’t just protect individual patches of reef; we must ensure that reefs are protected in connected networks to allow the exchange of genes. And finally, we must pay particular attention to the presence of hot reefs in these networks, which should allow heat-adapted larvae to spread to other reefs.
From Science to Action
Despite the importance of genetic variation in coral reef resilience, approaches to reef management often fail to account for evolutionary criteria. This is because assessing coral reef genetic diversity is costly and requires expertise that many practitioners do not have available.
CORAL is working closely with partners to evaluate whether we can estimate coral reef genetic diversity and adaptive capacity from remotely sensed data. As we develop adequate proxies, we can then scale these up, creating a globally applicable tool, which we’re aiming to launch in 2025.
Making this information easily and freely accessible worldwide would catalyze its incorporation into coral reef management and marine spatial planning processes as part of countries’ 30×30 commitments. Our Global Conservation Science team’s goal is to influence and leverage partners, fieldwork, and technology to drive adaptation-focused conservation solutions that will rescue coral reefs from the effects of climate change.
Climate REEFS
In 2023, CORAL proudly expanded its conservation efforts into the Coral Triangle, a vital marine region spanning six countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste. This biodiversity hotspot is home to 76% of the world’s coral species and supports the livelihoods of millions through fishing, tourism, and coastal protection services.
As part of the Climate REEFS initiative (Integrating Risks, Evolution, and socio-Economics for Fisheries Sustainability)—a multi-million dollar collaboration of partners in the USA, UK, Indonesia, and the Philippines—CORAL is working to develop techniques to identify adaptive reefs using remote sensing technologies. The ultimate goal of this effort is to develop a freely available, online tool that can identify genetically diverse reefs across the globe. In-country Climate REEFS partners hope to work with relevant government bodies in Indonesia and the Philippines to co-create revised provincial and national-level marine management plans that reflect our findings.
Identifying and Prioritizing Adaptive Capacity in Marine Conservation
CORAL also developed an international consortium of conservationists, ecologists, and computer scientists with a shared interest in evaluating whether we can measure coral reef diversity and adaptive capacity from space. Through examining relationships between measures of diversity (e.g. species diversity, genetic diversity, and others) and remotely sensed metrics at a series of pilot sites, this group strives to identify the best proxies for reef measures of adaptive potential—work that complements the research undertaken by Climate REEFS.
Our members’ research encompasses a range of approaches and spans three oceans: the Pacific, including sites in the North (e.g., Hawai’i, Palau, and Republic of the Marshall Islands), South (e.g., Fiji), and Indo-west Pacific (e.g., Indonesia and the Philippines), the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean (Mozambique), and the Atlantic (e.g., Honduras and the Turks and Caicos Islands).
Influencing Reef Conservation Approaches Across the Globe
Through outreach and collaboration with partners, CORAL’s approach to reef conservation has been shared and recognized across the globe.
Last year, for instance, CORAL contributed to the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Target 3 Partnership Meeting in Cambridge, which aimed to coordinate implementation efforts of the Post-2020 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and build technical capacity. The guidelines developed at this meeting and ones like it will inform conservation approaches for diverse ecosystems everywhere on Earth.
CORAL has also recently been accredited by the UN Environment Programme, co-published seven high-impact scientific papers over the last seven years, and shared its findings at multiple high-profile conferences and events.
Notably, in 2023, CORAL further expanded its reach by securing a grant from USAID to fund two CORAL Fellows, one of whom is supporting Pacific Coral Triangle countries, based in Honiara, and one of whom is supporting Southeast Asian countries in the Coral Triangle, based in Manado at the Regional Secretariat of the Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries, and Food Security. These locally-based consultants are contributing to a climate risk assessment for Coral Triangle reefs as well as a policy analysis that aims to inform fisheries management by reviewing gendered climate vulnerability and climate risks.
Looking Ahead
CORAL’s Assess efforts, which center around understanding how we can protect reefs to encourage effective climate change adaptation, are critical to the future health and resilience of coral reefs worldwide.
By working to create readily available tools and resources that enable practitioners in under-resourced settings to incorporate genetic diversity into their coral reef conservation approaches, we’re working to improve the odds that coral reefs will survive and recover in a rapidly changing world.
Our commitment to understanding how we can help corals adapt continues to yield meaningful results. Over the last few years, we’ve successfully co-authored multiple successfully funded research projects, expanded our work to the Coral Triangle (a hub of coral reef biodiversity), and continued to form and strengthen partnerships that help us magnify our international impact. CORAL is not only working to save coral reefs but also to foster a global community united by a common goal: to protect and restore one of our planet’s most valuable and life-giving ecosystems. Together, we can ensure coral reefs—and the communities that depend on them—continue to thrive for generations to come.
See Also: What is a Marine Protected Area?
