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84 Percent: Inside the Worst Coral Bleaching Event Ever Recorded · How To Protect The Ocean

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This year, a lot of the coral on the planet went through some sort
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of bleaching event because of a heat stress, some of them severe enough
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where we had a good amount of bleaching.
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Not necessarily a mass bleaching event, 'cause apparently we're at the end of one.
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But about 84% of the world's reefs area across the Pacific, Atlantic, and
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Indian Oceans had some sort of heat stress severe enough to bleach it.
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And now I know a lot of the times we see reports, you
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know, bleaching events happen.
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We see global bleaching.
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We see corals are in trouble.
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We're worried about the corals.
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I often wonder, I'm like, "Where are corals from a global standpoint?
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Are we losing them all?" Do we know when they're gonna be lost?
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Is it something that we need to be worried about, or is this just, like,
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headlines just trying to get clicks?
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Scientists have been studying, and they continue to study coral reefs all
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the time, and they're looking at it.
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And when you speak to a coral reef scientist, you ask them, you're like,
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"Is there really that much hope?"
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And they're kinda back and forth.
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I think we have to ensure that these reefs can persist,
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whatever that's gonna look like.
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The reefs we know today or that we knew back in the '50s and '60s and '70s are
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different today, and they're gonna be different in another 40 or 50 years.
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It all depends on which corals can actually survive the heat stress that
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we're undergoing, and if we can't change that heat increase, then that stress
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is gonna continue to happen, and we are going to see more and more changes,
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maybe to the point that we just see less coral reefs, and that's obviously
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something that we don't wanna do.
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So what I thought I would do today, because this week is all
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gonna be about coral restoration.
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On Friday, I have an interview with Michael Goldberg, who runs ICare, which
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is I Care About Corals, which is an organization in the Florida Keys that
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is based on coral restoration, and he has a dive shop, and he has a whole
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thing we're gonna talk about on Friday.
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It's amazing.
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But I wanted to kinda cover today's episode as, like, what's
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the global health of coral reefs.
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And then how do we know, like, when we're in a coral bleaching, a
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global bleaching event for corals?
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How do we know when it's ended?
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Is there a point in restoring coral reefs?
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And what does that look like just beyond planting coral fragments?
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Does any of it actually work?
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How is the practice itself changing, and how has it changed over the years?
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So this is, like, episode one of four this week, or really five this week,
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four solo episodes, all built around that conversation I had with Mike
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Goldberg, a co-founder of ICare, a coral restoration group in the Florida Keys.
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But this is the How to Protect the Ocean podcast, where you get all your
2:22
ocean news updates and conservation news each and every week, Monday to Friday.
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If you like this type of information, hit that follow button right now because
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you wanna pass it to a friend like you would a good book, please do so.
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If somebody's asking me, like, "Hey, what are the coral reefs like?" Well, do so.
2:46
There's a lot of scientists in this audience.
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If people are asking you, you can pass this episode, 'cause I'm hoping that
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this will be sort of like an update on global health of corals in general, and
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then why we do restoration to help that.
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All right.
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So NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, and
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the International Coral Reef Initiative confirmed a fourth global mass
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coral bleaching event, running from January 2023 to roughly March 2025.
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So not that long ago.
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So that, looking at how much were affected, 84% of the world's coral reefs
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hit with a bleaching-level heat stress.
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The damage reported in 82 of the 83 countries and territories across all three
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ocean basins, which was the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian Oceans.
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Now, compare that to some of, like, the three prior global bleaching events and a
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pattern that we're seeing is escalating.
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It's not just a one-off.
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In 1998, we hit 21% of reefs.
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In 2010, we hit 37% of reefs.
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In
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2014 to 2017, it was, hit a 68% of reefs.
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In 2023 to 2025, it hit 84% of reefs.
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So you can see that escalation happening.
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It's scaling, not in a good way, meaning that bleaching is occurring more and
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more, and these bleaching events are huge.
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These bleaching events are big, and we're gonna talk, gonna
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talk about that in a second.
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Now, every global event on record has been worse than the one before it, and
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each has coincided with strong El Niño.
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Now, we have just finished an El Niño and a coral bleaching event in 2025.
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We are about to enter another El Niño year.
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It was confirmed this summer, and this might be what people like scientists
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consider a super El Niño, which is gonna make it even worse and, heat
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and storms and everything a lot worse.
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Now, 2024 was the hottest year on record and the first calendar year to cross the
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1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels with triple the previous
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global record for marine heatwaves.
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So not looking good.
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Now, NOAA had to add three brand new alert levels to its bleaching alert
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scale because the existing scale had no category for what was happening.
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The new top level, level five, flags risks over 80% of coral
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mortality of an affected reef.
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So essentially what happens when you get those heat stresses, and they
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last for a long enough period, NOAA will send out their Coral Reef Watch,
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will send out these alert systems and says, "Hey, we are at level three.
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We're at level four.
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We're at level five.
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We're at 80% of coral mortality could be affected." That's the risk that we're at.
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Now Derek Manzello, who's the NOAA's Coral Reef Watch coordinator, has been
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quoted as saying, "We are now in the era where reefs will bleach on a near annual
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basis." It used to just be like sometimes they bleach, sometimes they don't.
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Now it just seems like it's part of the new norm.
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That's not normal for marine science and the ocean.
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Now, a peer-reviewed study in 2021, like the study that came out from the
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University of British Columbia, which is by Eddie et al., published in One
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Earth, found the world lost roughly half of its coral cover between 1957 and 2007.
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Just as it kinda overlapped the 1998 and before the 2010 mass bleaching
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event, we lost roughly, like, half, like 50% of the coral cover
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worldwide between 1957 and 2007.
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And with some nations losing up to 6.8% of their reefs over the past decade.
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Reef biodiversity fell 63%, and reef fish abundance fell 60%
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over that 50 some odd years.
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That's incredible.
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That's awful.
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Now, what's actually riding on that decline is roughly one billion
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people worldwide depend directly or indirectly on coral reefs.
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About 25% of all marine species live in and around reefs.
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Reefs are like a biodiversity haven.
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It's the same biodiversity density people associate with rainforests.
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So, you know, it's funny, like I covered deep sea mining a couple weeks ago.
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And when we covered that,, Gerard Barron, who's like the head of TMC,
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which is one of the mining companies, said that, " Right now we're mining
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in a rainforest, so we know we don't wanna destroy things in a rainforest,"
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plus all the human rights violations.
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But there's also the biodiversity.
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Let's just go down to the deep where there's not much biodiversity.
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It just so happens that there was more biodiversity than we expect in
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the deep sea, but there's a lot in the rainforest that people recognize.
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So having that decrease about 25%, that's a big hit.
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And, you know, healthy reefs absorb about 97% of incoming wave energy from
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tsunamis or any kind of storms, meaning there are coastlines, first line of
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defense against storms and erosion.
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So in the US alone, reefs generate an estimated $3.4 billion a year in
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economic value, including $1.8 billion a year in averted flood damage.
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That's a lot of money saved and a lot bringing in just from
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the economic value of reefs.
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Like it's not only for protection, but it brings in business: divers, snorkelers,
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kayakers, fishers, like recreational fishing, all that kind of stuff.
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Now, the interview we did on Friday, we talked about, like with Mike, we
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talked about shifting baselines.
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How that's a problem that he described.
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He was a diver who back in like in the '90s, '80s and '90s, he
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was like, "Oh, wow, it's like everything is covered wall to wall.
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There's no patches on the reef where you just see bare rock." Now, you know, he
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looks today and he's like, "It's sparse.
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This is like a patchy reef." Now, if somebody went, started diving today and
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went to a reef in the Keys, and you went there and you saw, like, just patchy reef,
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you'd just be like, "Oh, this is what the reef looks like." You didn't know,
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you weren't aware what was happening back then because it's not really well shared.
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But if you talk to a diver who's been diving for, like, 40 years, 30
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years, they'll tell you that there's been a huge decline, especially in
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the last 10 years within the Keys, and we talk about that on Friday.
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Because, like, going back to the shifting baseline, people just haven't seen the
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wall-to-wall coral that we used to see.
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So the baseline for quote-unquote "normal" keeps resetting downward.
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It keeps getting, like, worse and worse.
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So now, like, I wanna talk just going back to the bleaching event.
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You know, when we talk about global bleaching events.
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I wanna talk about how that's declared, because when somebody says
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there's a global bleaching event, I'm thinking like 90% of the corals are
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feeling it, but that's not the case.
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You know, I looked it up.
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I did a little bit of research to find out what it actually is.
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So there are categories.
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It's not just a casual label.
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Like, there's a specific category that's saying obviously they have levels to this.
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But NOAA's Coral Reef Watch uses specific operational threshold
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built after 2014 and 2017 event.
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So the global bleaching event is declared only when all three tropical ocean basins,
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so Pacific, Atlantic, and the Indian Oceans, independently cross the same bar.
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At least 10% of the basin's reef-containing locations
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experience heat stress of four or more degree heating weeks.
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So that means, you know, there's an increase in the heating stress
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and there are four or more degree heating weeks, so where , it's at
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there, then they start to look.
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And a satellite track measure linked to significant bleaching
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or some coral mortality.
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So they get reports in from the different places, the different locations.
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They're gonna look at satellite data, they're gonna look at
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a lot of different things.
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Now, NOAA tracks this within an eight-month detection window because,
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you know, obviously all the basins, summer's different in Australia
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than it is in the US or in the West.
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So it's a lot different that way.
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Now, if only two of those three basins cross that line, cross the 10%
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threshold, NOAA issues a global bleaching warning instead of a full-on event.
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So it's a step below a full grade global event declaration.
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So NOAA doesn't call an event over the moment the heat stress drops.
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So it doesn't say there's an end to this event.
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Like we know how it starts, now how it ends.
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You know, widespread bleaching has to stop occurring simultaneously
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across all three basins.
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And then NOAA monitors sea surface temperatures and bleaching reports
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for several more months, roughly about six more months, before confirming
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that the event is even finished.
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Since the Southern Hemisphere bleaching often runs on the opposite seasonal
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clock from the Northern Hemisphere.
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So we know that that's a little different.
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So like Christmas time for Australia is summertime.
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So it's always the beginning of summer there.
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So now let's talk about the question I had was like, did the fourth
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event that we had in 2025 that was supposed to end in 2025, did it end?
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And it did.
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So NOAA first called it likely, quote unquote, "likely ending in
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2025," with bleaching in Western Australia in early 2025, marking
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roughly its last widespread signal.
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So like, as I said before, Australia summer starts in December, so in early
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2025 we still had bleaching events because that was their summertime,
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which is the hottest time of year.
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And then so they waited a little bit, before they declared it ending.
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So final confirmation waited until NOAA had verified no widespread,
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bleaching occurred anywhere during the following, austral summer, so
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December 2025 through February 2026.
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With that confirmation landing in first half of 2026.
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The event's active window is dated early 2023 to mid-2025.
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That's essentially when the last, the fourth bleaching event occurred since
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we started recording bleaching events.
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Now, ended doesn't necessarily mean it's over in a reassuring sense.
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Like NOAA has already flagged elevated bleaching risk for the
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North Pacific, Florida, and the Caribbean tied to an anticipated new
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El Niño that's coming, even as this event is being formally closed out.
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So even though we're at the end of this event, we're still
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seeing bleaching events happen.
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Just it's not on a wide scale, as wide a scale.
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But then there's an El Niño coming in, potentially a super El Niño,
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which we don't even know what that's gonna mean yet for what
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these like corals are going through.
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But we know that during El Niño events, we tend to have the worst
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actual global bleaching events.
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So now Manzello, the program director for the NOAA's Coral Reef Watch,
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his own framing is that reefs have entered a new era of near annual
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bleaching, which I mentioned earlier.
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So we have the declaration.
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We know the different levels.
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They've increased to having a level five 80% of the coral's bleach,
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which was the last event that we saw.
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We know that that's increasing.
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We know we're about to go into an El Niño, and we know we're about
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to maybe go into a super El Niño.
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And reefs are still undergoing bleaching since the last bleaching
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event ended, quote, unquote, "ended."
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So how do we manage reefs?
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There's a case for restoration.
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Local restoration, there's a case.
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But we're in still dire need because, the climate change isn't
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getting any better at this point.
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We are seeing events that are happening like wildfires, droughts, storms,
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and things that are making things worse, releasing more carbon through
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wildfires and all that kind of stuff.
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And the IPCC's own 1.5 degree Celsius special report projects coral reefs
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will decline 70 to 90% even if the world holds to this 1.5 degree Celsius.
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And more than 99% would be lost at two degrees Celsius, which
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we're not that far off of.
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The question is, like, if we plant coral, is it just decoration that's about to die?
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Like, are we doing it for the right reasons?
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Is it just something that's loss of hope?
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Some people don't believe that.
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Some people will believe.
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I remember when I first heard of coral restoration, I'm like,
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it's really difficult 'cause restoration in general for any ocean
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or water body is very expensive.
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Even if you want a poor habitat.
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Like, I remember working in the Great Lakes pouring rocks into
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the Great Lakes, into like Lake St. Clair or anything like that.
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Even just planning that, the costs were like half a million dollars just
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to put rocks in, like fish habitat.
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And so it's expensive to restore any kind of habitat, to do fragmenting, and to pay
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the people to go out and to do all that.
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It costs money to set up the infrastructure and everything like that.
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It costs money.
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So how do we justify the money if we think that they're going to die?
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That's the question here.
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Is it really worth it?
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So we're gonna talk a little bit about what's been going on, and what we can do.
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'Cause every fragment of surviving a restored reef is still doing,
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like, real work while it's alive.
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It's buffering a coastline, feeding fish, supporting a local tourism economy.
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And restoration isn't necessarily a substitute for cutting emissions.
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We still have to, do the work.
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It's what keeps reefs functioning long enough like emissions fight to catch up.
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I wanna kind of put it in context, if I can make this analogy on
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the run here, like in my head.
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I'm watching my weight.
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I'm always trying to watch my weight, and I've been working out for a long time.
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And working out does a certain amount for you.
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It increases cardiovascular health, builds muscle, and it's good for
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you as long as you do it properly and do it where you risk injury.
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Obviously, there's always a risk, but you know what I mean.
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Now, I started CrossFit when I, you know, back in 2013, I was doing it, and I even
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see people now, they're like, "Oh man, yeah, I remember when you were really
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into CrossFit," because I'm not as much into it now just because of injuries and
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lifestyle situations and things like that.
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It's been a hard few years after COVID.
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But I was in good shape.
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Like, I had good shape.
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But I never really, like, lost a lot of weight.
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I'd go up and down, but, like, I would work out.
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The workout kind of restored my body.
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But the actual work to have long-lasting effects on my
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health had to come from eating.
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If I wanted to lose more weight, even if I worked out, if I wanted to lose
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more weight, I had to eat less, or I had to change the way I was eating.
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I was an impulse eater for quite some time.
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Still am sometimes.
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You have to do the work to go through that, and that's the tough work.
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That's always the difficult work because
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if you really get into, like, what eating and impulse eating, a lot
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of times it's like a mental thing.
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It's like a habit-building thing and sometimes there's underlying things
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going on, especially in my case.
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So if I use the analogy that trying to get climate change reduced is like
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trying to reduce weight on a regular basis by changing your habits, your
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eating habits, and your nutrition habits.
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But the workout part is like the restoration of a reef, where
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it's like you work out, you're gonna be okay for a little bit.
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You can be a little bit more resilient.
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But the real work here is getting that nutrition in, psychologically not
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going after the foods that are really bad for you, so if you wanna have a
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long, sustaining life or do whatever you can to have that long, sustaining
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life, from a health perspective.
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That's where it's at.
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The nutrition part is the climate change reduction.
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The restoration part is like the working out.
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It kinda gives you a little bit more resilient.
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So that's what we're talking about when we look at this type of work.
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Now, the way to approach a global problem, the only real way, of this size, is to
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narrow down to, like, one coral cluster.
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It's like to niche down in business.
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One small reef, one community at a time.
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Trying to solve the whole ocean, the problem, it's not gonna work.
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'Cause, like, all at once is how, like, people give up from when,
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like, even before they even start, because it's such a huge problem.
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So restoration may also be building resilience, not just buying time.
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Because, like, even from our guests on Friday, Mike's own field observations,
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like, this year's water temperatures would have caused a mass bleaching event
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in 1995, and this isn't happening the same way today according to his anecdotal
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o- observations from the work that he's doing in front of him in the Keys.
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Because the coral being propagated now descends from stock that
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have already survived earlier bleaching events and disease events.
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which is nice because we don't know how these reefs are changing
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in terms of their tolerance.
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The strongest will survive.
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Natural selection will happen.
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It's evolution.
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So the species that don't handle the change in temperature swings
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well, they are going to die off.
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The other ones are going to stay.
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So we might already have seen a switch in the species makeup of these reefs.
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But the future reefs, the ones that are being fragged, have already survived
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this level, this baseline level that has increased over that time.
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You know, it's almost like, if you listen to earbuds, you have earbuds in,
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you listen to music really, really loud.
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when you stop playing that music and you take them off, your hearing
18:08
threshold has gone down because you can't hear as much, but you become a
18:11
little bit more resilient to it inch by inch, even though it's bad for you.
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So I just wanted to let you know, like, we're seeing some
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resilience for some of these corals.
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And, like, I covered this on Ocean Decoded Live on my YouTube channel.
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There's some swings in the Great Barrier Reef, like from really hot marine heat
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waves to lower, like, days or summers or part of the summers that's better,
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and it's actually helping coral cover when the swings go towards cooler.
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They're resilient.
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They come back.
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So I think that's an interesting way to view the problem, is
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let's look at it locale by locale and see how we can do this.
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So when we're looking at restoration, we're looking at reducing emissions.
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That's a long-term goal.
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The restoration's the short-term goal.
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Build the resilience that they need to handle the world in which we live
18:52
in now, so that when we do reduce the climate change problem, then we're
18:56
gonna be able to help those corals.
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They'll bounce back even quicker.
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So I think that's good.
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Now, I wanna talk a little bit about restoration and looking at
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coral conservation and restoration.
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So fragment-based coral gardening, which, basically you take a coral, which
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is a colony of corals, and you start chipping off these little fragments.
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And then what you do is you go into this, like, incubator in your lab
19:20
or something, and you start to regrow them, and you start to make
19:23
sure that they're growing well.
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And then you replant them into the ocean where you took them from,
19:28
and then they grow from there.
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So that's the beauty about corals.
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They can just kinda grow.
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It builds their resilience.
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But at least when they're younger or they're smaller, they
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have a chance to get a little bigger before you replant them.
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So that's sort of, like, what ICARE does, which we're gonna talk about
19:41
on Friday, and we're gonna talk about probably later on this week.
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It's the most viable restoration method, but it's one tool in the
19:48
toolbox amongst several tools.
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So I wanna talk, before we go totally into restoration, talk
19:54
about, like, the different types of restoration that we have.
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It's not just fragging.
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There's other things.
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So larval propagation, which is coral IVF, essentially.
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So this is, you know, what we're gonna cover soon, is like, it basically
20:05
collects coral eggs and sperm during natural mass spawning, culture
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the larvae, and release or settle them directly onto degraded reefs.
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It doesn't require handling of adult coral at all, which
20:16
is kinda good, which is nice.
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Now, there's selective breeding, assisted evolution for heat tolerance.
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So researchers at the Coral Assist Lab and the Palau International Coral
20:25
Reef Center ran a seven-year selective breeding program, cross-breeding
20:30
heat-tolerant parent corals and testing offspring after three to four years.
20:34
So the results published in "Nature Communications" 2024, the heat tolerance
20:38
could be enhanced by roughly one degree Celsius a week within a single generation,
20:44
with the genetic basis for the trait hetirability around about 0.2 and 0.3.
20:50
So it, I guess, passes on to the next generations.
20:52
One thing to, note, though, the projected heat wave intensity
20:54
is rising by about three degree Celsius a week, so per decade.
20:58
So that's obviously increasing a lot faster than what this breeding is doing.
21:02
The study explicitly states, like, selective breeding cannot
21:05
replace urgent climate action.
21:07
In many of these restoration efforts, climate action, urgent
21:10
climate action is where we're at.
21:12
Now, there's also cryopreservation and coral biobanking.
21:15
So the Smithsonian's Reef Recovery Initiative and the International
21:18
Coral Biobank Analysis, which has over 200 coral species now held in human
21:22
care, freeze coral sperm and larval in liquid nitrogen and are developing
21:27
methods to freeze whole coral fragments.
21:29
This is genetic insurance essentially.
21:31
So letting scientists combine genetic material from parent corals
21:34
that would never naturally meet.
21:36
So in practice, the idea is the Smithsonian has already
21:39
produced 600 genetically diverse elkhorn corals, which is like a
21:42
acropora, like a branching coral.
21:44
Individuals using cryopreserved sperm, a meaningful boost given
21:49
only around 150 wild e- elkhorn colonies remain in Florida.
21:53
So there's definitely reasons for this.
21:55
Another method of restoration is coral probiotics or microbiome manipulation.
21:59
So it's a body of research, notably around 2018, 2019 study, in the ISME
22:04
Journal, is testing whether introducing beneficial micro, organisms for coral,
22:09
so BMCs, into a coral's microbiome can increase its resistance to bleaching.
22:14
The same underlying idea as probiotics in human or animal
22:17
health applied to coral tissue.
22:19
So essentially, you know how you say have your probiotics pills
22:22
in the morning, or you eat yogurt 'cause it has probiotics in it?
22:24
That's the idea is it helps you be more resilient towards change.
22:28
Engineered substrates, two different approaches here for that.
22:31
So biorock or mineral accretion.
22:33
So running a low voltage electrical current through submerged metal
22:37
frames caused dissolved minerals to accrete onto the structure,
22:41
giving coral a surface to bond.
22:42
So that helps as well.
22:44
And then, of course, deployed for decades in Bali is the, Pemuteran's Karang
22:49
Lasanteri Project of 50 plus structures.
22:52
And of course it's elsewhere too, not only in Bali.
22:54
The technology's own promoters cite dramatic survival and growth
22:58
multipliers, flagged above as needing independent verification.
23:01
So a 2025 peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Marine Science and
23:05
Engineering tested custom ceramic tiles in Hong Kong's Hoi Ha Wan Marine Park.
23:10
It was seeded with 378 coral fragments.
23:13
The results after four years, 88% coral survival, and compared
23:16
it to an unrestored site, seven times more fish and almost 60% more
23:21
invertebrates by visual survey.
23:23
So environmental DNA sampling found an increase in biodiversity by
23:26
23.5% than the unrestored area, and even 13.3% higher than the natural
23:33
reference reef, which is great.
23:35
And then, of course, there's marine protected areas and
23:36
local stressor reduction.
23:38
So protecting herbivorous fish like, parrotfish, which graze down the algae
23:42
that would otherwise smother corals, and cutting local stressors like
23:46
overfishing, sedimentation, and nutrient pollution from coastal development.
23:50
It's pretty intuitive, the way we talk about marine protected areas on here
23:53
and then other things that we talked about in terms of development and sort
23:55
of sedimentation due to development and nutrient pollution like reductions.
23:59
It needs to be said, like there's not enough coastal
24:01
marine protected areas in there.
24:03
Sometimes it gets caught up in the 30 by 30 because a lot of these coastal
24:06
MPAs will be smaller, and they may not contribute enough percentage
24:09
to actually fit the 30 by 30.
24:11
But they're just as important, if not more important, ' cause these habitats like
24:14
coral reef, seagrass areas, mangroves, are crucial to the next generation of fish.
24:19
That's where a lot of these larval and juvenile animals are spending time before
24:24
they go off to be adults in other areas.
24:26
So that's a huge thing.
24:28
Now, obviously, like there was a widely studied 2019 peer review, in
24:31
the annual review of marine science directly challenges the assumption that
24:34
MPAs and herbivore protection reliably build climate resilience, arguing
24:38
that oceans warming affects corals, routinely overwhelms local protections.
24:41
Obviously, the boundary is not a physical boundary, and water heats
24:45
up, and the MPAs can't really help it.
24:47
But they can take the pressure off of, like, the external.
24:50
Even pollution sometimes help, but you're taking away any kind of
24:53
extractive activities, whether it's like diving, whether if people are
24:56
diving 'cause they can hurt it, or extractive activities like fishing,
24:59
mining, all that kind of stuff.
25:00
So this is a interesting debate within the MPA system and just
25:03
scientists and conservations.
25:05
But MPAs do provide protection for coral reefs.
25:08
It's just a different type of protection.
25:09
It's more fisheries and biodiversity-based, which biodiversity
25:12
provides stability, so that's always good.
25:14
Now, of course, you know, one thing to note that none of the above
25:17
changes the fact that global emissions reduction is the one lever that
25:20
determines whether any of this holds long term, any of this restoration.
25:24
It is the Band-Aid.
25:26
All of these methods above are the Band-Aid.
25:27
Restoration is the Band-Aid until the problem is solved.
25:30
Every method here is about buying time and building local
25:34
resilience, not a substitute for it.
25:36
So I wanna make that clear, 'cause it may not work all the time because
25:41
you never know what's gonna hit.
25:42
We're heading into El Niño.
25:43
You don't know how that's gonna change everything.
25:46
So now let's talk about, like, does restoration actually work?
25:49
Can it work in the long term?
25:51
And is it worth it even if it doesn't work all the time.
25:54
But let's talk about some of the evidence.
25:55
So let's look at sort of the big picture.
25:57
So 2025 meta-analysis in Nature Communications covering 764
26:02
marine restoration interventions across habitat types found an
26:06
average success rate around 64%.
26:10
And that's using a 50% survival threshold.
26:13
So coral reefs were among the better performing habitats at 67% to 74% success.
26:19
So similar to salt marshes and ahead of seagrasses, that were at 56%.
26:24
So about 9% of the interventions were complete failures, but
26:28
a lot of them had success.
26:30
So there was, like one of the local case studies for reef restoration looked
26:34
at reef function that recovers fast.
26:36
So the Mars Coral Reef Restoration Program in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, restored
26:41
reef damage decades ago by blast fishing using coral transplants plus steel
26:46
structures to stabilize loose rubble.
26:49
So now this was published in Current Biology, one of the journals of 2024.
26:52
The coral reef's net carbonate budget, essentially measure like whether a reef is
26:56
growing or eroding, tripled within four years and matched healthy control reefs.
27:00
Now, that's a direct measurable signal that a restored reef can
27:04
rebuild its coastal protection function on a real timeline.
27:08
So now, something to know though is the restored reefs skew toward fast-growing
27:12
branching corals, which kinda like tells you like, depending on the coral, how
27:16
things will rebuild and how composition will look and diversity will look.
27:20
Now another case study, it was a 15-year track record, a community-based
27:23
elkhorn coral Acropora palmata, restoration in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico.
27:29
So it ran from 2008 to 2023, published in Sustainability in 2024, the journal.
27:35
Outplanted coral colonies grew from an average diameter of 17.9
27:39
centimeters to 243.3 centimeters.
27:42
So the restored plots had 2.4 times more fish species and 2.6 more total
27:47
fish than restored control plots.
27:49
And with herbivorous fish increasing up to sixfold, which is great ' cause
27:53
it's exactly the grazing community that is needed to help out.
27:56
So there are a lot of case studies that go into this, and I can
27:59
read all the stuff, but it shows that we are seeing success rates.
28:02
But like local success doesn't necessarily claim that it's a global success.
28:06
Remember we talked about let's keep it local.
28:09
Like a 2005 peer-reviewed paper in Nature Ecology and Evolution reviewed
28:12
220 restoration projects worldwide, found restoration reliability works at
28:16
a local scale, roughly 200 square meters to two hectares over the months to years.
28:21
But it's not currently a viable fix for global scale, like
28:24
it's good for local areas.
28:26
So the numbers behind that, about 11,700 square kilometers of reef were
28:30
degraded globally between 2009 and 2018.
28:34
So total global restoration investment over the past decade was about $258
28:39
million, while restoring even 10% of degraded reef would
28:42
cost a minimum of $1 billion.
28:44
And under current climate trajectories, an estimated 99.6% of restored reefs
28:49
are still projected to face mass bleaching by 2100 without emissions cuts.
28:54
So if we don't do anything from now on, that's what's gonna happen.
28:57
This is essentially why we want to do local areas to help local
29:01
people, local communities.
29:04
Now, there's a way to measure these different types of restorations.
29:08
NOAA and the Coral Restoration Consortium jointly publish a coral reef restoration
29:12
monitoring guide, so different projects and regions can be compared on the
29:15
same terms, which is always great.
29:16
This is what science does.
29:18
And it splits metrics into universal metrics every project should track.
29:21
So coral survival and condition, growth and size, genetic diversity
29:25
of restored population, water temperature, and so forth.
29:28
And it's a goal-based metrics tied to what a specific project
29:31
is actually trying to achieve.
29:32
So could be ecological recovery, community and economic benefit, disaster
29:37
response, climate adaptation, or research.
29:40
So it's evaluated at multiple scales, from individual colony
29:43
up to population and landscape.
29:44
There's a lot that goes into this document.
29:46
And across an actual published studies above, like the metrics that
29:50
keep showing up are like the percent survival at fixed time intervals.
29:53
So the single most common metric in the field, like live coral cover,
29:57
reef carbonate budget or net growth, fish abundance and species richness,
30:02
structural complexity, genetic diversity of outplanted stock, and an increasingly
30:06
environmental DNA sampling, which is to catch biodiversity shifts and
30:09
a visual survey can't alone track.
30:11
So it's kinda cool.
30:13
Now, we're gonna talk about the monitoring that Mike Goldberg's
30:17
organization, who we're gonna talk to on Friday, ICARE goes through.
30:20
We're gonna talk about that on Thursday.
30:22
Looking at being transparent with the data and the survival
30:25
and how well that's going.
30:26
Now, the evolution has changed for restoring reefs.
30:29
In the early 1980s, the discovery that made everything really
30:31
possible is Peter Harrison.
30:33
Like then a young researcher discovered mass synchronized coral
30:36
spawning on the Great Barrier Reef.
30:38
Corals releasing eggs and sperm in the water column on
30:40
the same night once a year.
30:42
That discovery was the foundation for larval-based restoration decades later.
30:46
And the first wave, like 1970s and 1980s, like restoration starts as
30:50
scientific curiosity and salvage work, made possible as scuba diving became
30:54
more widely accessible and early environmental protections appeared.
30:58
The hand transplanting live coral fragments and building artificial
31:01
structures, it's just to grow on.
31:02
Like, that's what's really coming.
31:03
I remember when I was getting into the marine aquarium phase
31:07
of my life, I looked at corals.
31:09
There was a site dedicated to help people create fragments and how to
31:12
frag properly, and it was like a whole open database kind of thing.
31:15
It was really, really great.
31:17
And then from 2000 to 2010, restoration matures into an actual discipline.
31:21
So coral nurseries appear, growing fragments in a controlled
31:24
setting before outplanting them.
31:26
That's important.
31:27
Practitioners start addressing causes, not just symptoms.
31:29
So they remove algae, invasive lionfish, and crown-of-thorns starfish
31:33
in Australia, and then managing overcrowding at popular tourism dive
31:37
sites, especially across the Caribbean.
31:39
Now, the actual breakthrough though is like in 2012, Dr.
31:42
David Vaughan at Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida Keys accidentally breaks
31:45
a coral fragment against the side of a tank during a routine handling.
31:49
Everyone's like, "Uh-oh." Instead of dying, it heals and
31:52
grows at an explosive rate.
31:53
He turned that accident into a deliberate experiment, and by
31:57
2015 confirms microfragmentation.
32:00
Cutting slow-growing stony coral into small pieces to trigger 25 to
32:04
40 times faster growth than the same coral would achieve in the wild.
32:08
Now, one of the field's biggest breakthroughs, and it started with just a
32:12
mistake because somebody, broke a coral.
32:14
In 2013, larval restoration goes live, building on Harrison's
32:17
1980 spawning discovery.
32:19
The first successful coral IVF reef trial happens in the Philippines.
32:23
Collecting coral eggs and sperm during a natural mass spawning event.
32:26
culturing larvae.
32:27
We're gonna have somebody on later on this year, talking about that because
32:31
that's a technique that's huge.
32:32
It now produces tens of millions of larvae per spawning event, and
32:35
has scaled across the Great Barrier Reef with expansion underway in the
32:38
Maldives, Caribbean, and Southeast Asia.
32:40
I think we're gonna be talking about the Maldives project.
32:42
Now in 2016, it was like, kind of like a third wave.
32:45
The restoration becomes a full-scale diversified practice.
32:47
So microfragmentation and larval propagation running alongside
32:51
assisted evolution, biobanking, probiotics, and engineered substrates,
32:55
combined with something new.
32:56
Built-in partnerships between government, business, tourism operators, and
33:00
volunteer divers, rather than just science running on its own.
33:02
Rather than just, it's just scientists trying to figure out what the next thing
33:05
is, but they couldn't implement it.
33:06
We need the implementation.
33:08
And I care that we're gonna speak to Mike, the co-founder, is
33:11
really the modern-day example.
33:12
We'll talk more about that, but now he's gonna have pop-up
33:15
nurseries, going in in October.
33:17
They're gonna be able to, basically restore a lot more areas, than
33:20
they were able to do before.
33:22
I know this is a longer episode, but even though coral reefs just came through,
33:25
like, one of the most severe global bleaching events ever recorded, where
33:28
84% of the reefs area were affected.
33:30
It added a fifth level onto the global event watch kind of levels of risk,
33:35
you know, between 2023 and 2025.
33:36
And NOAA only confirms an event over after months of monitoring
33:40
shows it's generally done, not just cooling off, off temporarily.
33:44
We know we're going into something worse.
33:46
El Niño, super El Niño.
33:48
We might see the fifth event that happens two years after the fourth event.
33:52
But we know restoration is here to help us is to provide
33:55
that resilience that we need.
33:57
It's that quick resilience in tough times.
33:59
and there's so many different ways of doing it, and everybody's, like, science
34:03
and practitioners are actually working to implement these ways and monitor them
34:08
and be transparent about them in order to share what they've been able to find
34:12
and where we can bring our practice over.
34:15
And in the next three days, the next three episodes, we're gonna be talking
34:18
about some of the things that Mike Goldberg went through and sort of
34:21
his evolution before we talk to him and you hear it in his own words.
34:24
And I think that's… it's gonna be really interesting to see over this
34:28
week where Coral Reef is and how it's affecting that, you know, just one
34:32
person in the US to say, "Hey, I'm gonna make a difference," and starts an
34:35
organization to make that difference.
34:38
And then five and a half years later, they're already
34:39
expanding, and it's great to see.
34:41
So that's it for today's episode.
34:43
I know it's been a long episode.
34:45
My gosh, one of my longer episodes that's solo episodes.
34:47
But I think it's an important aspect to figure out, and it's
34:50
something that we need to build on.
34:52
We need to look at from a global perspective.
34:55
This is global reefs, and how do we build resilience in global reefs?
34:58
It's local restoration for now, but it doesn't ignore the fact
35:01
that we need climate resiliency.
35:03
We need reduction in climate change right now, yesterday,
35:07
the day before, last decade.
35:09
It is imperative, and we can't ignore that.
35:12
Global coral reefs are the canary in the coal mine.
35:14
They are the indicator of how well we're doing, and we're not
35:17
doing well, and we need help.
35:18
So ways that you can help are gonna come this week.
35:21
Hit that follow button to make sure that you don't miss any of the other
35:24
episodes that are coming out this week.
35:25
I wanna thank you so much for joining me on today's episode of the
35:28
How to Protect the Ocean podcast.
35:29
I am your host, Andrew Lewin.
35:30
Have a great day.
35:31
We'll talk to you next time, and happy conservation.