Global warming of 1.5C ‘still catastrophic for nearly all coral reefs’
EVEN LIMITING global temperature rises to 1.5C will be “catastrophic” for coral reefs, scientists have warned.
Countries have agreed to curb global warming to 2C, and pursue efforts to limit temperature rises to 1.5C to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, including more extreme floods, storms, heatwaves and damage to crops.
But scientists led by the University of Leeds warn that the climate risk is even worse for coral reefs than set out in a UN assessment in 2018 which warned 7090 per cent would be lost at 1.5C of warming.
That assessment, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), also found almost all corals would vanish at 2C of warming.
The new research has found that more than 90 per cent of tropical coral reefs would suffer frequent “intolerable” heat stress as a result of ocean warming even under the tougher 1.5C limit.
Locations that can maintain suitable temperatures for corals to survive, while the ocean temperatures in surrounding areas rise, are known as “refugia”, and were identified by the researches as areas projected to suffer severe heat stress less than once in 10 years. This is around the amount of time for reefs to grow back and be fully functioning.
But at 1.5C of warming, that will fall to just 0.2 per cent. No “refugia” areas will exist with 2C of warming, the study based on historical data and climate models shows. Lead author Adele Dixon, of the University of Leeds’s School of Biology, said: “Our finding reinforces the stark reality that there is no safe limit of global warming for coral reefs.”