Coral restoration won’t save reefs from global warming, according to a recent study – at least, not the way we’re doing it now. The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Helsinki and published earlier this month in Nature Ecology & Evolution, finds coral degradation is significantly outpacing restoration efforts. Its results indicate most unsuccessful projects fail due to prohibitive costs, lack of global coordination, location unsuitability, and bleaching events caused by rising water temperatures, during which coral becomes white due to stress. Algae called zooxanthellae live within corals, providing nutrients and protective compounds, as well as giving corals their vibrant colors. But when water temperature changes too much, corals expel their zooxanthellae, which causes them to become white, or “bleached.” While corals can recover from short-term bleaching, corals can die if water remains too warm for too long. The leading cause of coral bleaching is increased ocean temperature caused by climate change. Image by Wendy Cover/NOAA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain). Despite “public perception and scientific enthusiasm” for coral restoration, we can’t restore our way out of this one, the study finds. “Scaling up restoration to any meaningful level going beyond the very local scale would be extremely challenging,” senior author Giovanni Strona, now a quantitative ecologist at the European Commission in Italy, told Mongabay. Sebastian Ferse, a senior ecosystem scientist at the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research in Germany, who wasn’t involved with the study, told Mongabay that its results suggest “reef restoration is prohibitively expensive,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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