Following on from the declaration of a “state of emergency”, Roger Bradbury had this to say in the New York Times Opinion Pages:
“IT’S past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants here and there, but the global coral reef ecosystem — with its storehouse of biodiversity and fisheries supporting millions of the world’s poor — will cease to be.”
He accuses environmentalists, scientists and governments of “false hope”: he has a negative view of the state of the worlds reefs and their prospects of recovery:
“Overfishing, ocean acidification and pollution have two features in common. First, they are accelerating. They are growing broadly in line with global economic growth, so they can double in size every couple of decades. Second, they have extreme inertia — there is no real prospect of changing their trajectories in less than 20 to 50 years. In short, these forces are unstoppable and irreversible.”
Mr Bradbury argues we should be preparing for the worst, and the negative impact the loss of reefs will have upon “ hundreds of millions of people in poor, tropical countries like Indonesia and the Philippines who depend on coral reefs for food.”, not to mention tropical tourism and the ultimate knock on effects of the loss of biodiversity.
Read the entire article here.