An international team of scientists has proposed new set of rules to save world’s coral reefs. At the World Ocean Conference 2009 in Manado, Indonesia the team has unveiled their proposal. In the conference leaders of six regional governments plus Australia and the United States are meeting to declare the largest-ever marine reserve in world history, the Coral Triangle Initiative.
According to the researchers from the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS) the catastrophic decline in the world’s coral reefs demands urgent management responses on two fronts. They said that these are the reduction of immediate direct threats such as climate change, over-fishing and water pollution, and actions to protect or enhance the resilience of reef ecosystems in the face of existing and unavoidable future threats.
The main purpose of saving threatened coral ecosystems is to maintain the links (connectivity) between reefs allowing larvae to flow between them and re-stock depleted areas, the team led by Pew Fellow Dr Laurence McCook of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) argues. Dr McCook opined that ecological connectivity is critically important to the resilience of coral reefs and other ecosystems to which they are linked.
The researchers propose six ‘rules of thumb’ for keeping coral ecosystems viable, based on the results of research carried out in the Bohol Sea in the Philippines, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and Kimbe Bay in Papua New Guinea. The researchers said that the risks of inadequate management arising from ignoring connectivity are greater than those associated with any scientific uncertainty,” the researchers say.
