Cutting CO2 Could Save Dying Corals

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Cutting CO2 Could Save Dying Corals

Sunday, 13 July 2008 08:31

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(From ipsnews.net) Fort Lauderdale, U.S. - The rapid decline of coral reefs around the world offers a potent warning that entire ecosystems can collapse due to human activities, although there is hope for reefs if immediate action is taken, coral experts agreed at the conclusion of a five-day international meeting Friday.
While the global threat of climate change to oceans appears overwhelming, reducing CO2 levels in the atmosphere will automatically reduce ocean acidity, said Joan Kleypas of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado.
"The planet will never be like it was in the year 2000, or 1900 for that matter," he said. "We need to look forward and see where we want to go and start moving in that direction."

In 1998, a massive coral bleaching due to warm ocean temperatures linked to global warming killed 95 percent of reefs in large parts of the Indian ocean, in 2002 60 percent of the Australia's Great Barrier Reef bleached, in 2005 it was the Caribbean that suffered a 50 to 90 percent loss because water temperatures were too high for too long, reported David Souter, coordinator of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network located at the Australian Institute of Marine Science.

And those corals that don't die outright are often afflicted by disease in the following years, Souter told the symposium.

"Corals in American Samoa are bleaching every summer and are very close to death," says Douglas Fenner, a biologist at Marine and Wildlife Resources, American Samoa.

The reefs he is studying are in small isolated pools where the water warms 2 degrees C more than the average.

"This is our window into the future 30 to 100 years from now," Fenner told IPS.

Climate change will warm the oceans by at least 1.5 degrees C and possibly far more in the coming decades and based on Fenner's studies of these warm pools, corals will grow much more slowly, reproduce poorly and are unlikely to survive in the long term.

It gets worse when ocean acidification, another product of climate change, is factored in.

Lab experiments where seawater acidity is increased to the levels expected in 2020 and 2060 uniformly show several important species of algae that helps glue reefs together do not grow well and their death rate increased under those high acid scenarios, said Guillermo Dias- Pulido of Australia's University of Queensland.

"We may be facing ocean deserts in the future," Dias-Pulido said in an interview, adding that he has only studied a few species and there are at least 650 species on the Great Barrier Reef, and some may prove to be resilient.

(By Stephen Leahy)

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