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coral reefs
'Our New Reality': Planet Reaches First Climate Tipping Point With Coral Reef Dieback
“We can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk,” said one researcher. “This is our new reality.”
Oct 13, 2025
Less than two years after researchers at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom warned that the world was nearing numerous climate tipping points, a report out Monday warns that one such "point of no return" has already been reached, with warm-water coral reefs "experiencing unprecedented dieback."
Surging global temperatures, especially in recent years, have pushed the world's coral reefs into a state of widespread decline, with the worst bleaching event on record taking place since 2023. More than 84% of the world's reefs have been impacted.
In the Global Tipping Points Report 2025 released Monday, the researchers warned that "the central estimate" of coral reefs' "tipping point of 1.2°C global warming has been crossed," with planetary heating now at about 1.4°C above preindustrial levels.
The warming waters have caused widespread bleaching of coral reefs, which impacts the nearly a million species of marine animals and organisms that rely on them to support some of the planet's most diverse ecosystems.
“Unless we return to global mean surface temperatures of 1.2°C (and eventually to at least 1°C) as fast as possible, we will not retain warm-water reefs on our planet at any meaningful scale,” the report says. Minimizing non-climatic stressors, particularly improved reef management, can give reefs the best chance of surviving under what must be a minimal exceedance of their thermal tipping point."
The decline of coral reefs also leaves coastal communities without natural barriers against storm surge, compounds the overfishing crisis by depriving fish of a habitat in which to reproduce, and impacts thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in reef tourism each year.
"As we head into the COP30 climate negotiations it’s vital that all parties grasp the gravity of the situation."
"We can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk,” Steve Smith, a social scientist at the University of Exeter and a lead author of the report, told Nature. “This is our new reality.”
The arrival of the tipping point necessitates immediate, significant reductions in fossil fuel emissions that are driving planetary heating in order to return to a global mean surface temperature of 1.2°C over preindustrial temperatures, but climate scientist Bill McGuire did not mince words Monday regarding the likelihood of mitigating the damage already done to coral reefs.
"We won't reduce temps to 1.2°C as soon as possible, so this is the death knell for most of the world's stupendous reef communities," said McGuire. "Other tipping points will follow."
The report notes that the world is still headed toward other climate tipping points, namely the "large-scale" degradation of the Amazon rainforest, which is projected to "weaken global climate regulation" and accelerate biodiversity loss; the melting of mountain glaciers like Áakʼw Tá Hít in Alaska; and for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which regulates the climate by transporting warmer waters from the tropics to the northern Atlantic Ocean, whose likelihood of reaching a tipping point "increases with global temperature" rise.
Without rapid cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, the Global Tipping Points report says, the upper threshold of global temperature rise for coral reefs of 1.5°C is likely to be reached within 10 years.
“We are going to overshoot 1.5°C of global warming probably around 2030 on current projections,” Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute told The Guardian.
Manjana Milkoreit, a co-author of the report and political scientist at the University of Oslo, told Nature that "we have the knowledge regarding how to stop the Earth from reaching more tipping points."gr
“What we need is a kind of governance that matches the nature of this challenge," she said.
The report also acknowledges "positive tipping points" that could have runaway impacts on the ability to rapidly draw down greenhouse gas emissions, such as the widespread adoption of regenerative agricultural practices and an acceleration in the transition toward electric vehicle and solar power use.
"Solar PV panels have dropped in price by a quarter for each doubling of their installed capacity. Batteries have improved in quality and plummeted in price the more that are deployed," reads the report. "This encourages further adoption. The spread of climate litigation cases and nature positive initiatives is also self-amplifying. The more people undertaking them the more they influence others to act."
Lenton told The Guardian that "the race is on to bring forward these positive tipping points to avoid what we are now sure will be the unmanageable consequences of further tipping points in the Earth system."
As Common Dreams reported last week, global progress toward transitioning away from fossil fuels and expanding the use of renewable energy is surging worldwide—but the US has been left out this year under President Donald Trump, with a major spending bill imposing new fees on solar and wind development and boosting drilling on public lands while the US Department of Energy is investing $625 million in coal.
The Global Tipping Points report was released four weeks before global leaders are set to meet in Belém, Brazil for the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP30), where policymakers will be asked to contribute to a Granary of Solutions: "a reservoir of concrete tools and initiatives—scalable, replicable, and aligned with the Paris Agreement—that connect ambition with implementation" in order to trigger "positive tipping points of transformation leveraging solutions that already exist."
"As we head into the COP30 climate negotiations it’s vital that all parties grasp the gravity of the situation,” Mike Barrett, chief scientific adviser at the World Wide Fund for Nature in the UK and a co-author of the report, told Yale Environment 360. “Countries must show the political bravery and leadership to work together and achieve them.”
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'Graveyard of Corals': Bleaching Led to Great Barrier Reef's Worst Die-Off on Record
"We will ultimately get to a tipping point where coral cover can't bounce back," warned one researcher. "We have to mitigate the root causes of the problem and reduce emissions and stabilize temperatures."
Aug 06, 2025
After last year's climate-fueled bleaching in Australia's famed Great Barrier Reef, large swaths of the GBR suffered the worst coral die-off since records began, a government report revealed Wednesday, prompting renewed calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as reef conservation and restoration.
The GBR "experienced unprecedented levels of heat stress, which caused the most spatially extensive and severe bleaching recorded to date," the Australian Institute of Marine Science's (AIMS) annual report states.
AIMS studied the health of 124 coral reefs between August 2024 and May 2025 and found that northern and southern branches of the approximately 1,400-mile (2,300 km) GBR suffered the "largest annual decline in coral cover" ever recorded since monitoring began nearly 40 years ago.
Data collected last year from aerial surveys showed that 75% of the GBR had been bleached amid record heat driven by the worsening climate emergency. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warned in March 2024 that the bleaching would likely be the worst the world had ever seen.
The new report confirmed that "the 2024 event had the largest spatial footprint ever recorded on the GBR, with high to extreme bleaching prevalence observed across all three regions" of the GBR.
According to AIMS:
In 2025, hard coral cover declined substantially across the GBR, although considerable coral cover remains in all three regions. Regional declines ranged between 14% and 30% compared to 2024 levels, with some individual reefs experiencing coral declines of up to 70.8%. These declines are primarily attributed to coral mortality from the 2024 mass coral bleaching event, compounded by the cumulative impacts of two cyclones in December 2023 and January 2024, freshwater inundation, and some crown-of-thorns starfish activity.
In 2025, 48% of surveyed reefs underwent a decline in percentage coral cover, 42% showed no net change, and only 10% had an increase. Reefs with stable or increasing coral cover were predominantly located in the central GBR.
Scientists described the resulting seascape as a "graveyard of corals."
AIMS research lead Mike Emslie told Agence France-Presse that the "number one cause" of GBR coral decline "is climate change."
"There is no doubt about that," Emslie added.
The problem is by no means limited to the GBR. A mass global bleaching event has devastated more than 80% of the world's coral reefs over the past two years, affecting 82 countries and territories.
Prior to the current die-off, the last major GBR bleaching event occurred in 2014-17, when scientists said nearly one-third of its coral died and approximately 15% of all reefs worldwide experienced major coral deaths.
"These impacts we are seeing are serious and substantial and the bleaching events are coming closer and closer together," Emslie said in a separate interview with The Guardian.
"We will ultimately get to a tipping point where coral cover can't bounce back because disturbances come so quickly that there's no time left for recovery," he warned. "We have to mitigate the root causes of the problem and reduce emissions and stabilize temperatures."
AIMS called for greater global efforts to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions fueling planetary heating, "continued good local management," and more interventions "to help corals adapt and recover."
Larissa Waters, leader of the Australian Greens and a federal senator representing Queensland, on Monday urged the governing Labor Party to "follow the science, set 2035 targets at net-zero, stop new coal and gas, or risk losing our reef, its immense biodiversity, and the 60,000 jobs it sustains."
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Fossil Fuels Blamed as 84% of World's Coral Reefs Hit by Worst Bleaching Event Ever Recorded
"The magnitude and extent of the heat stress is shocking," said one marine scientist.
Apr 23, 2025
A year after scientists warned the world was seeing its fourth mass coral bleaching event, rising ocean temperatures fueled by greenhouse gas emissions have now devastated 84% of Earth's coral reefs—with likely knock-on effects for about a third of all marine species and 1 billion people whose lives and livelihoods are directly impacted by the health of the "rainforests of the sea."
Coral Reef Watch at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its latest data on Wednesday, showing the current bleaching event has become the most widespread on record, impacting reefs from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic and Pacific.
The news comes three months after scientists confirmed 2024 was the hottest year on record. Last year, meteorologists also found that sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic were about 2°F higher than the 1990-2020 average and nearly 3°F above the average in the 1980s.
Unusually warm ocean waters cause corals to expel algae that give the reefs their bright color and deliver nutrients, supporting the immense biodiversity that is normally found within the reefs. Prolonged bleaching can kill coral reefs.
"The magnitude and extent of the heat stress is shocking," marine scientist Melanie McField, the founder of the Healthy Reefs for Healthy People initiative in the Caribbean, told Reuters. "Some reefs that had thus far escaped major heat stress and we thought to be somewhat resilient, succumbed to partial mortalities in 2024."
Derek Manzello, director of Coral Reef Watch, told The Guardian that some reefs that had been considered safe from the impact of rising ocean temperatures have now been bleached.
"Some reefs that had thus far escaped major heat stress and we thought to be somewhat resilient, succumbed to partial mortalities in 2024."
“The fact that so many reef areas have been impacted," he said, "suggests that ocean warming has reached a level where there is no longer any safe harbor from coral bleaching and its ramifications."
The current coral bleaching event began in January 2023. That same year, scientists were alarmed by an ocean heatwave off the coast of Florida that rapidly bleached the continental United States' only living barrier reef.
That event prompted NOAA to introduce a new coral bleaching alert scale from Level 1—significant bleaching—to Level 5, at which point a reef is approaching mortality.
Another ocean heatwave last year threatened Australia's Great Barrier Reef, eight years after nearly half of the coral in some northern parts of the 1,400-mile reef was killed by a mass bleaching event.
But recent major bleaching events affecting specific reefs have not compared to the current widespread devastation in the world's oceans.
“Reefs have not encountered this before," said Britta Schaffelke, coordinator of the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, told The Guardian. "With the ongoing bleaching it's almost overwhelming the capacity of people to do the monitoring they need to do. The fact that this most recent, global-scale coral bleaching event is still ongoing takes the world's reefs into uncharted waters."
The other three mass bleaching events on record occurred from 2014-17, with 68% of the world's reefs affected; in 2010, when 37% were impacted; and in 1998, when 21% suffered bleaching.
The report from Coral Reef Watch followed the Trump administration's under-the-radar release of climate change data that minimized NOAA's findings about the level of planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere. President Donald Trump also issued an executive order demanding sunset provisions for every existing energy regulation and notified companies that they can seek exemptions to clean air regulations.
Joerg Wiedenmann, a marine biologist at the Coral Reef Laboratory at the University of Southampton in England, emphasized that taking action to stop the heating of the world's oceans could protect coral reefs, the marine species they provide habitats to, and the communities they support by protecting coastlines and providing fishing and tourism jobs.
"If we manage to decrease ocean warming," Wiedenmann told The Washington Post, "there is always a chance for corals to recover."
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