WWF: World's richest reef system could soon succumb to climate change

Coral Triangle

WWF: World's richest reef system could soon succumb to climate change

Johnny Langenheim / Friday 25 September 2015 / http://www.theguardian.com/global/the-coral-triangle/2015/sep/25/wwf-worlds-richest-reef-system-could-soon-succumb-to-climate-change

Scientists are predicting the demise of most of the world’s coral reefs by as early as 2050. The Coral Triangle is the richest of them all and could be the first to go.

The publication last week of the Worldwide Fund for Nature’s (WWF) Living Blue Planet report painted a bleak picture of the state of the world’s oceans: marine populations, including reef ecosystems, have halved in size since 1970 and some species are teetering on the brink of extinction. Coral reef cover has declined by 50% in the last 30 years and reefs could disappear by as early as 2050, the report says, if current rates of ocean warming and acidification continue. WWF estimates that 850 million people depend directly on coral reefs for their food security - a mass die-off could trigger conflict and human migration on a massive scale.

100 million of these reef-reliant peoples live in the Coral Triangle – singled out in the report as “richer in marine natural capital” than anywhere else on earth. Currently, fisheries exports from the Coral Triangle – which encompasses the waters of Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Timor Leste – amount to around $5 billion (£3.3 billion), including 30% of the global tuna catch, and a lucrative trade in live reef fish for food markets, which is worth nearly $1 billion (£655 million). But there are serious questions about the sustainability of these fisheries.

A report by Greenpeace published on Monday called out 13 Indonesian and eight Philippines tuna canneries, which it says are failing in three key areas – supply chain traceability, sustainability and employee equity. All but one of the businesses surveyed were graded ‘poor’ and none were classified as ‘good.’ Most of these canneries supply brands in the EU, America, Japan and the Middle East.

The live reef fish for food trade – which has a huge market in Hong Kong and Mainland China as well as other Southeast Asian cities – has sent stocks of key reef predators like grouper plummeting in many parts of the Coral Triangle. As with tuna, the industry is poorly regulated and destructive fishing methods like cyanide capture – where a milky solution of potassium cyanide is squirted into reefs to stun fish – remain popular across Indonesia and the Philippines.

But the severest threat is to the reef ecosystems themselves. 85% of reefs in the Coral Triangle are classified as threatened, significantly higher than the global average of 60%. The bioregion’s vulnerability to climate change was further underscored in a report on biodiversity redistribution caused by warming seas that was published in Nature Climate Change on 31 August. It is thought that some marine ecosystems will be able to balance themselves out as temperature changes cause species to migrate from one area to another. But the report authors singled out the Coral Triangle as being especially vulnerable to ‘high rates of extirpation’ (i.e. complete species eradication) based on a key climate model produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In the face of these threats, The Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries & Food Security (CTI-CFF), a multilateral partnership between Coral Triangle countries, NGOs and the Asian Development Bank, is developing collaborative action plans to try and sustainably manage the bioregion’s natural capital. Nature based tourism – thought to be worth $12 billion (£7.8 billion) – has become a key priority, since it dovetails with the urgent need to protect key seascapes in the Coral Triangle.

Raja Ampat off the coast of West Papua, thought to be the global epicentre of biodiversity, is one example of a successful collaborative strategy, bringing together local government, communities, tourism operators and non-profits to manage its ecosystems sustainably. In Malaysia, WWF has been working with government agencies to gazette a 1m square hectare marine reserve off the north coast of Borneo. The Tun Mustapha marine park aims to balance the needs of various stakeholders from industrial fishers to local communities to tourism businesses within a sustainable framework, rather than strictly controlling a very small zone, which was the prevailing model for marine reserves in the past.

But in the face of the slow moving juggernaut of global warming, it’s difficult not to regard these measures, worthy as they are, as akin to putting a plaster on a gunshot wound. Only around 4% of the world’s ocean is ‘designated for protection’, compared to between 10-15% of its land surface; many marine reserves are poorly managed and enforcement can be non-existent. There is an urgent need to establish more and to shore up existing ones across the Coral Triangle to maximise the benefits of coral reef ecosystems in the short to medium term.

The UN Sustainable Development Summit is taking place in New York this weekend and oceans are on the agenda for the first time. Hot topics include over fishing, food security for island states and pollution. Action in these areas is needed at the very least so as not to exacerbate the impact of the elephant in the room - climate change. Should warming hit the 2C threshold - a target that’s come to be seen somewhat arbitrarily as an upper limit, but that many scientists now regard as unachievable - most reefs will likely be devastated by coral bleaching, according to the IPCC.

The big decisions will be made of course in Paris at COP 21 at the end of November. On Tuesday, Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) stated that existing pledges by the international community would only be enough to cap global temperature increases at 3C by the end of the century.

“3C is much better than 4-5C, but it is still unacceptable,” she said. A cap of 3C may represent progress, but for the Coral Triangle and for reefs around the world, it could be catastrophic.