An AI analysis of decades of coral reef observations suggests about 64,000 square miles of reefs could still be resisting climate change by 2050.
The study used 45,000 observations of coral reefs dating back to 1960 and an AI model that assessed 46 criteria. It predicted that, 25 years from now, surviving reef areas roughly the size of Wisconsin would remain, mainly across eight countries.
Most of those reefs were mapped in the Philippines, Indonesia, Cuba, the Bahamas and Australia. Belize, Nicaragua, and the Turks and Caicos Islands also showed coral resilience in 2050 in the estimates.
The findings were presented at the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya, and are available on the preprint server EcoEvoRxiv.
The mapping draws on the idea of “coral refuges,” places where coral species can endure warmer seas, recover from damage faster, or avoid damage altogether. The locations of those refuges came from the 45,000 observations used in the study.
Why corals do well in some of those places is “not exactly clear,” according to the source text, including in Nicaragua and neighboring Honduras, where Honduras’s largest coral reef is described as facing substantial ecosystem disturbance from human activity while still seeming to flourish year round.
Sara Hashemi, a daily correspondent at Smithsonian Magazine, wrote that the authors want their work “to offer a road map for where countries should invest conservation funding, especially for small nations with limited resources.”
Hashemi began her report by noting that “it’s hard to feel optimistic for coral reefs” these days.
The source text also points to recent coral conservation and restoration efforts. It says 77,000 square miles of tropical seas will be off limits to fishing after Papua New Guinea created the Western Manus Marine Protected Area this year.
That protected area, in the Coral Triangle, will form part of the Melanesian Ocean Corridor of Reserves, a network of national and jointly managed protected areas spanning Fiji, Vanuatu, and Papua New Guinea.
In January, the source text said scientists in Mauritius were naturally breeding heat-resistant corals that faced a bleaching event last summer with 98 percent survival rates.
It also said scientists in the Maldives recently bred 10,000 corals in weeks using a portable station shipped in a container to the archipelago.
In 2022, the source text said lab-bred corals spawned out of season for the first time along Australia’s northeastern coast.
And in 2024, according to the source text, a Nat Geo expedition found what it described as the world’s largest coral, stretching longer than a blue whale and longer than four tennis courts.
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