You don’t have to travel far from the sprawling convention center that’s staging the UN climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, to see what’s at stake. This coastal resort town is fringed by an ecosystem seemingly facing worldwide cataclysm from global heating – coral reefs.
As negotiators haggle over an agreement that may or may not maintain a goal to restrain global temperature rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the nearby corals face a more brutally unyielding scenario.
Even if the 1.5C limit is kept, more than 90% of worldwide reefs will be destroyed by severe aquatic heatwaves with the more likely temperature increase of 2C, meaning all coral formations will face their doom. We face the “stark reality that there is no safe limit of global warming for coral reefs” as Adele Dixon, a researcher at University of Leeds’ School of Biology, put it after unveiling this grim research earlier this year.
