Back from the brink: the global effort to save coral from climate change

Warming water has led to the collapse of coral reef systems in the western Indian Ocean, essential to fisheries, protecting shorelines, and reducing beach erosion and sea-level rise. Marine scientists from Nature Seychelles, as part of an international project to protect and restore the reefs, are promoting varieties of coral that they have found to be resistant to the rise in temperature.

Often it is faster and easier to harvest molecules for medical purposes from nature than to make them in a laboratory. A scientist is looking for cancer-fighting molecules in coral and sponges in the tropical Pacific.

Climate change is a mounting threat to coral reefs, which serve not just as critical habitats for ocean life and a draw for the tourism industry, but also as a buffer to the increasing storms caused by changing weather patterns. In the first scheme of its kind, private businesses, nonprofits, and the government in Mexico's Yucatán Penninsula are combining financial resources to take out an insurance policy on their coral reefs. The insurance will help rebuild the reefs after storms and man-made damage, and fund new ways to keep them healthy.

Climate change is destroying coral reefs at a startling rate - threatening the livelihoods of millions of people, increasing the damage caused by storm surges, and affecting the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Scientists are now exploring revolutionary - and sometimes controversial - methods to learn more about and preserve coral reefs, including selective breeding of those species proven to survive conditions such as high toxicity and heat, and cultivating the regrowth of colonies one centimeter at a time.

Could kids be part of the solution in the fight to save coral reefs? These researchers in Belize think so. The Community Researcher Training Program, managed by James Foley and the Toledo Institute for Development and Environment (TIDE), is an environmental institute in Belize that invites students from local communities to conduct research that may have a direct impact on saving these reefs.

In an effort to collect data about the environmental health of high traffic destinations, researchers are examining the text and images of geotagged social media posts. Tweets about the Great Barrier Reef were analyzed for relevant information about specifically where people visited, common activities, and common complaints. While people passively provided data by geotagging posts, researchers are also proposing creating hashtags that allow for people to actively communicate data to researchers through social media posts.

Coral reefs on the brink of near extinction, but the more we know about the reefs themselves, the better chance they have to survive - or so says a group of coral reef specialists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. This group has implemented a 3-D imaging mapping project at the University of Queensland in Australia with the goal of equipping communities with the knowledge needed to help coral reefs survive another major bleaching event.

Scientists and conservationists have been pushing for more marine protected areas, regions that restrict human activity to protect marine life. But, they're quickly realizing it’s not about the quantity of mpa’s, but the quality.

After nearly back-to-back coral bleaching events made headlines internationally, there's been an increased awareness around the need to save what's left of the species. The newest strategy being implemented has to do with genetic technology that helps scientists determine via DNA markers which types of coral may be the most weak and the most resilient. “Scientists’ goal right now should be to take the steps necessary to optimize coral species so that each successive generation is more resilient,” explains marine biologist Ruth Gates. Although still early in its debut, this is the goal of genetic technology.

Belize, cited by Darwin as home to “the most remarkable reef in the West Indies," recently became the first country to issue a moratorium on all offshore oil exploration and drilling in order to protect the reef and the species that rely on it.