Last year, a bold initiative set out to locate coral reefs most likely to survive global warming. That turned out to be far easier said than done – but now scientists hope the results will rally attention to regions where there’s hope to save crucial marine ecosystems.
It was only after coral reef ecologist Emma Kennedy accepted a postdoctoral position at a prestigious research group in Australia that she learned details of her assignment.
Working with a team of top scientists led by her boss at the University of Queensland’s Global Change Institute, she and a colleague would have a year to develop of list of 50 coral reefs that had the best shot at surviving climate change until – or if – global temperatures stabilized under the terms of the Paris climate accord. Identifying those reefs now could help rally people to protect them from more prosaic but still deadly threats like overfishing and pollution. The thinking was that larvae from those reefs could also help repopulate other reef areas that don’t survive.
It was always going to be a bold endeavor, but at first, Kennedy thought the idea of picking 50 reefs in a year was more like mission impossible.
“I went home and thought maybe I should quit now because it’s just too big of a challenge,” she said.
A flurry of attention followed when the 50 Reefs project laid down its own gauntlet in a public announcement. With half of coral reefs lost around the world in the last 30 years and up to 90 percent projected to die in the next, the initiative brought in three foundations, a team of more than a dozen scientific advisers and major conservation groups in an urgent, collaborative effort to create the “first global plan to save the most biodiverse ecosystem on the planet,” according to the February 2017 press release.
Read more: Inside the Mission to Find 50 Reefs That Could Survive Climate Change
A new publication titled 'Climate Change and Cities: Second Assessment Report of the Urban Climate Change Research Network,' co-edited by Dr. Shobhakar Dhakal of the Asian Institute of Technology has been released.
