What you read in newspapers, watch on television, and hear in radios about the effects of the current El Niño phenomenon like drought, dry spell, water crisis, food insecurity, and surging heat index are only the apparent consequences.
Those effects are obvious because you can feel and experience them. But another impact that most people are not seeing are those that have an effect on coral reefs as they are under the seas.
Prominent scientists claim coral reefs are currently undergoing a global bleaching event, with more than 54% of the world’s coral reef areas experiencing heat stress.
“This is the fourth global event on record and the second in the last 10 years,” said the Coral Reef Watch (CRW) of US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). “Bleaching-level heat stress has been – and continues to be – extensive across the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Ocean basins.”
As the world’s oceans continue to warm, coral bleaching is becoming more frequent and severe. “When these events are sufficiently severe or prolonged, they can cause coral mortality, which hurts the people who depend on the coral reefs for their livelihood,” said Dr. Derek Manzello, a marine scientist and CRW coordinator, in a statement.
Corals grow in the warm waters, but many of them are near the limits of their tolerance for high temperatures. Bleaching is a breakdown of a “complex biological system” that corals have evolved in order to survive.
Each coral formation is a colony of hundreds or thousands of tiny organisms (known as polyps) that jointly build a skeleton that forms the reef. The outside layer of each coral polyp is inhabited by tiny one-celled plants scientists call zooxanthellae. It is these organisms that give the coral its bright colors, and when expelled due to warmer water or some other stress, coral appears bleached (that is, go pale or snowy-white).
Without zooxanthellae, the coral cannot survive for long. “Corals tend to die in great numbers immediately following coral bleaching events, which may stretch across thousands of square kilometers of ocean,” explained Dr. Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, who has studied the phenomenon of coral bleaching since the early 1980s.
Historically, El Niño events have “been the harbinger of severe bleaching events.” However, some scientists claim large-scale and severe coral bleaching has also occurred during La Niña periods.
La Niña is the cold phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO). Typically, La Niña produces contrasting effects on weather and climate compared to El Niño, which is the warm phase of the same phenomenon.
“This suggests that ocean temperatures may have increased to the point where large-scale bleaching events may now occur during any phase of ENSO,” Dr. Manzello told Mongabay.
The Philippines is not spared from coral bleaching events. The first ever documented mass coral bleaching happened in 1998. Between 2008 and 2010, an estimated 95% of corals were left dead by a massive bleaching event caused by severe El Niño events.
It must also be recalled that from 2014 to 2017, Tubbataha Reefs – one of the world’s most biodiverse as it is home to 360 coral species (about half of all known species) – faced two years of bleaching stress, after decades of relative calm.
The country’s coral reef area – estimated at 25,060 square kilometers – is the third largest in the world – after Indonesia and Australia. The Inventory of the Coral Resources of the Philippines in the 1970s found only about 5% of the reefs to be in excellent condition, with over 75% coral cover (both hard and soft).
Another study conducted in 1997 showed only 4% of reefs in excellent condition (75% hard or soft coral cover), 28% in good condition (50-75% coral cover), 42% in fair condition (25-50% coral cover), and 27% in poor condition (less than 25% coral cover).
Today, there is a lack of updated information on the present status of our coral reefs. The most recent study – the Nationwide Assessment of Philippine Coral Reefs – was published in the Philippine Journal of Science in 2017.
“Reefs sampled (in the study) were randomly selected from around the country, with the number of assessment stations for each of six biogeographic regions stratified by the total area of reefs in each of these regions,” wrote Rosemarie C. Señora in S&T Post, the quarterly publication of the Department of Science and Technology (DOST). “For two years, 166 reefs have been sampled.”
Based on live coral cover, more than 90% of the sampled reefs are in the “poor” and “fair” categories. “So far, the mean hard coral cover of the country at 22% is comparable with that of the Indo-Pacific region, but much lower than previous estimates for the Philippines,” Señora noted.
More than 40 million Filipinos live on the coast within 30 kilometers of coral reef areas. According to statistics, two million people depend on fisheries for employment, with about one million small-scale fishermen directly dependent on reef fisheries.
Recent studies showed the country’s reefs yield 5 to 37 tons of fish per square kilometer, making them very important to the productivity of fisheries. Fish, like rice, is the staple food of Filipinos.
“The Philippines is a major supplier of fish to the live reef food fish trade, a billion dollar industry in the Asia-Pacific region,” noted Reefs at Risk Revisited in the Coral Triangle, a publication published by the Washington-based World Resources Institute (WRI).
Leading marine scientists ranked the coral reefs in the Philippines as among the most threatened in Southeast Asia. “Nowhere else in the world are coral reefs abused as much as the reefs in the Philippines,” deplored Don E. McAllister, who once studied the cost of coral reef destruction in the country.
Coral reefs can live without human beings, but human beings cannot live without coral reefs. As Ian Somerhalder, an American actor and environmentalist, puts it: “Think about this: If water is the blood of our planet flowing through veinous rivers, streams, and into our oceans, what does that make coral? Our heart. We simply cannot survive without our heart; therefore, it’s mandatory we heal and protect our coral reefs now.”
The Philippine government made and introduced many laws in an attempt to protect the natural environment on the islands and in the national territorial waters. But the government cannot do it alone; help from individuals are also needed to save the reefs from total annihilation.
“We are the stewards of our nation’s resources,” said Rafael D. Guerrero III, a marine scientist and an academician at the National Academy of Science and Technology, “we should take care of our national heritage so that future generations can enjoy them. Let’s do our best to save our coral reefs. Our children’s children will thank us for the effort.”
All over the world, coral reefs are facing death. Before it is too late for the world to wake up one day without coral reefs, Dr. Simon Donner urged that something must be done now. He compared the international community to riding on a big ship like Titanic heading for oblivion.
“We have to hit the brake to slow down from moving to hit the iceberg,” urged Dr. Donner, a Canadian scientist based at the University of British Columbia. “We have to find something to lessen the impact of coral bleaching and other stressors from destroying the coral reefs.”
