- If we don't achieve a one and a half degree future
we will lose 99% of coral reefs
and the window to achieving one and a half degrees is really
within the next 10 years.
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And people somewhere may think, "Oh, well, I don't live
"on a coral reef, it doesn't really matter to me so much."
But if we let this happen to coral reefs,
then it becomes a runaway train.
The next tier of ecosystems are going to be impacted,
you know, a few decades after that.
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When you look back at said records of coral cover,
it's pretty much been stable up until around the 1970s.
And I think in the 1970s you started to see a decline
in heavily populated areas, large cities,
and tropical countries, and so on.
But it's really in the '90s once we got these
global mass bleaching events and climate change
really started to show its head.
With climate change, you have these huge, massive die-offs
of corals that affects massive areas of reefs.
So you get these real big step declines in corals
and because of all the other threats
they don't fully recover.
And then the next big bleaching event comes along
and it ratchets down a little bit further,
and so on and so forth.
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The basic threat to coral reefs is the same threat
as to other global ecosystems.
It's how we're degrading nature and fragmenting it
and using species unwisely.
And that happens because of the amount of consumption
that we have as people, the high levels of energy that
we use, so that's the carbon dioxide emissions,
but also, just the amount of energy enables us
to transform huge swaths of landscapes and seascapes,
so we really have to scale all of that down.
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In 2020, the Convention on Biological Diversity,
so that's the global agreement that all countries have come
to around how to look after nature,
had a range of targets.
These targets came to view in 2020
and we didn't score very well.
So now we're setting up a new range of targets
for the next 10 and even 30 years
for their global biodiversity plans.
It's critical that we make sure that, you know,
these new targets really address the challenges that are
impacting our coral reefs and other ecosystems.
We really need conservation to work where people are
using reefs and where people are very highly dependent
on them, because if we can't get people in those places
to protect them for their own good then, you know,
we will lose those reefs and we'll
lose the remote reefs, as well.
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