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indian ocean
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 toldThe Washington Post, "there is always a chance for corals to recover."
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Thousands Feared Dead in Impoverished French Territory of Mayotte After Cyclone Chido
"You feel like you are in the aftermath of a nuclear war," said one resident. "I saw an entire neighborhood disappear."
Dec 16, 2024
Undocumented migrants living in informal settlements in the French territory of Mayotte were among those whose lives and livelihoods were most devastated by Cyclone Chido, a tropical cyclone that slammed into the impoverished group of islands in the Indian Ocean over the weekend.
Authorities reported a death toll of at least 20 on Monday, but the territory's prefect, François-Xavier Bieuville, told a local news station that the widespread devastation indicated there were likely "some several hundred dead."
"Maybe we'll get close to a thousand," said Bieuville. "Even thousands... given the violence of this event."
Mayotte, which includes two densely populated main islands, Grande-Terre and Petite-Terre, as well as smaller islands with few residents, is home to about 300,000 people.
The territory is one of the European Union's poorest, with three-quarters of residents living below the poverty line, but roughly 100,000 people have come to Mayotte from the nearby African island nations of Madagascar and Comoros in recent decades, seeking better economic conditions.
Many of those people live in informal neighborhoods and shacks across the islands that were hardest hit by Chido, with aerial footage showing collections of houses "reduced to rubble," according toCNN.
"What we are experiencing is a tragedy, you feel like you are in the aftermath of a nuclear war," Mohamed Ishmael, a resident of the capital city, Mamoudzou, told Reuters. "I saw an entire neighborhood disappear."
Bruno Garcia, owner of a hotel in Mamoudzou, echoed Ishmael's comments, telling French CNN affiliate BFMTV: "It's as if an atomic bomb fell on Mayotte."
"The situation is catastrophic, apocalyptic," said Garcia. "We lost everything. The entire hotel is completely destroyed."
Residents of the migrant settlements in recent years have faced crackdowns from French police who have been tasked with rounding up people for deportation and dismantling shacks.
The aggressive response to migration reportedly led some families to stay in their homes rather than evacuate, for fear of being apprehended by police.
Now, some of those families' homes have been razed entirely or stripped of their roofs and "engulfed by mud and sheet metal," according to Estelle Youssouffa, who represents Mayotte in France's National Assembly.
People in Mayotte's most vulnerable neighborhoods are now without food or safe drinking water as hundreds of rescuers from France and the nearby French territory of Reunion struggle to reach victims amid widespread power outages.
"It's the hunger that worries me most. There are people who have had nothing to eat or drink" since Saturday, French Sen. Salama Ramia, who represents Mayotte, told the BBC.
The Washington Postreported that Cyclone Chido became increasingly powerful and intense—falling just short of becoming a Category 5 hurricane with winds over 155 miles per hour—because of unusually warm water in the Indian Ocean. The ocean temperature ranged from 81-86°F along Chido's path. Tropical cyclones typically form when ocean temperatures rise above 80°F.
"The intensity of tropical cyclones in the Southwest Indian Ocean has been increasing, [and] this is consistent with what scientists expect in a changing climate—warmer oceans fuel more powerful storms," Liz Stephens, a professor of climate risks and resilience at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, told the Post.
People living on islands like Mayotte are especially vulnerable to climate disasters both because there's little shielding them from powerful storms and because their economic conditions leave them with few options to flee to safety as a cyclone approaches.
"Even though the path of Cyclone Chido was well forecast several days ahead, communities on small islands like Mayotte don't have the option to evacuate," Stephens said. "There's nowhere to go."
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After Paris: How to Fight for Climate Change's First Victims?
Dec 24, 2015
When I was in Paris, I met with Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, a poet and young mother from the Marshall Islands. Kathy told stories of king tides breaking through her coral island's seawalls, with water quietly rising into her sleeping cousin's bedroom before a huge wave came and knocked her house over. (If her cousin's mother hadn't woken her, she would've went with it.)
I also met with Esau Sinook, an 18-year-old Inupiat Native American who lives on a barrier island called Shishmaref off the northwest coast of Alaska. The island is losing 3-4 meters of land a year and houses are falling into the sea.
"There is an incredibly powerful symbol right now in Europe: the boat. This is in the newspapers all the time. We know what that means. It means someone, in the poetry of it, putting everything they have into a small container and setting off, unsure of where we're going." --Kevin BucklandI also met Zara Pardiwalla, of the Seychelles, whose island home in the Indian Ocean faces saltier soil and bleached corals, meaning fishermen have to sail further and further out to find better catch.
Here's the rub: We don't know what to call these people. There is no label for Kathy or Esau or Zara on the international stage.
One of the most contested parts of the Paris negotiations was the issue of climate refugees. The U.S. removed compensation from the table before the talks even started. Still, even before the final draft, there was mention of forming a "climate displacement facility"—some entity that could help the folks staring out at Island-ruining waves. That got cut, too.
What made it into the Paris agreement is a pledge to "address displacement related to the adverse impacts of climate change," with a report back penciled for next year's summit in Morocco.
While this pledge is as watered down as you can get -- it also represents a lifeline. To understand how to seize it and why it took us so long to get here.
Erica Bower, an expert on "Loss and Damage" with the advocacy group Sustain US, told me that there is "no universal word to describe what it means to be forced to flee from your home." As a result, she said, "there have been so many debates in the last decade about definitions that it's stalled progress."
"Because people have been so fixated on having the right term, they don't actually act, they don't actually create the infrastructures that are needed to support these populations."
Some people want to use the phrase "climate migrants" while others want to use "climate refugees," and yet others want to use "disaster displaced person."
While "climate refugee" has the most punch to it, it's riddled with problems. As Bower explained it, one of those problems are that the phrase "climate refugee" implies sole causality when often climate change is an exacerbating force that worsens economic and political drivers (think: the Syrian refugee/war crisis and the 4-year record drought that preceded it).
Another major problem with the term "climate refugee" is it removes agency. According to Bower, "climate refugee" paints someone as a victim whereas people in Kiribati want to be described as "climate warriors" -- as people who have tremendous resilience and who will fight to stay in their country as long as they possibly can.
Without a name, it's been nearly impossible to rally for the world's first climate lost -- the people who are fleeing a planet that's gotten a lot tougher to live on. Kathy, Esau, and Zara still have homes, but since 2008, at least 22.5 million people were displaced each year because of sudden extreme weather events -- floods, typhoons, cyclones, and the like. That number is over double what it was in the 70s, and is a tenth of the 200 million climate-pushed migrants expected by 2050.
So, as we find footing after Paris, the question is: How do we find footing for the people who can't go home anymore?
The answer, I believe, lies somewhere at the juncture of an honest reckoning of loss, and a more nuanced struggle for justice.
As a movement, we've been stuck with the idea that we can fully and completely stop climate change. The waves of climate displaced--those we struggle to categorize or name properly--represent to at least some degree our failure as a movement to date. It's a failure we need to acknowledge, but more so it means that as we fight for the death knell of fossil fuels, we've now got to include justice for the survivors of a broken world for whom the renewable energy transition will simply come too late.
We saw the start of this evolution in Paris, where the final "D12" action included laying out long red canvas banners on the cobbled streets.
The red lines action began at the "tomb of the unknown soldier," where an eternal flame burns. People paid respect for climate change's victims—past and future—by dropping red tulips on the long banners.
The end of Paris showed a reckoning of human losses, an evolution from the naivete of saving the world, to trying to survive this one as best we can. While this work will include seeing through "the beginning of the end of fossil fuels," it now must also evolve into a global fight for the survivors -- for the displaced.
One other factor can help us seize the Paris lifeline. Symbols may offer a workaround since we've been stuck with clunky vocabulary.
Kevin Buckland, 350.org Arts Ambassador, described how symbols can act as containers for the losses and rallying cries we can't yet name.
Kevin told me about a new symbol that's been taking shape. "I think there is an incredibly powerful symbol right now in Europe, which is the boat," Buckland said. "This is in the newspapers all the time. We know what that means. It means someone, in the poetry of it, putting everything they have into a small container and setting off, unsure of where we're going."
New symbols that show humans in the crosshairs, like the boat, can maybe help us break the decade-long logjam to need the right words and incite the loud movement that is actually what we truly need to help the world's first climate homeless.
One of the oldest symbols of the climate fight, the polar bear, seems like it may have run its course.
At the end of our interview, Kathy, the Marshall Islands poet, told me:
"So, for people whose islands might be drowning, is that symbol not strong enough? Because polar bears are cute, you care more about them?"
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