It's built entirely of coral reefs.

A Future for the World u0027s Coral Reefs?

Herbivorous fish are key players on coral reefs.

Two things can be done to protect coral reefs.

Coral reefs attract a variety of beautiful marine life.

The main framework material of coral reefs is calcium carbonate.

Yet global deterioration of coral reefs is severe and ongoing.

And on top of the coral reefs are sand banks.

That's bad news for coral reefs and oxygen producing plankton.

Clearly, protecting coral reefs is a much better use of limited resources.

Focusing on coral reefs turns out to be a surprisingly efficient target.

It preserves biodiversity, with healthy reefs producing more fish and attracting more tourists.

For those of you who've been there, fantastic coral reefs, fantastic diving, fantastic snorkeling.

Corals grow slowly, so reefs sustaining severe bleaching will not recover before they bleach again.

And the reefs disappeared, and new islands formed, and we thought, Well, we're real smart.

We must mediate the severity of global warming, while simultaneously conserving the resilience of coral reefs.

And if the bleaching doesn't go away if the temperatures don't go down reefs start to die.

Coral reefs are the world's most biologically rich marine ecosystems, harboring some of the world's most beautiful organisms.

Given the magnitude of the threat to the world's coral reefs, the international community's response has been frighteningly slow.

On the scale of decades, in our lifetimes, we're going to see a lot of damage to coral reefs.

Half the coral reefs are still in pretty good shape, a jeweled belt around the middle of the planet.

But protecting coral reefs would bring the highest returns, amounting to an extraordinary 24 worth of benefits for every dollar spent. Like forests, coral reefs provide multiple services including tourism and fish nurseries, which help to sustain commercial fishing and have an intrinsic value to people.

When you are poor, you are more likely to slash and burn rain forest or fish atop coral reefs with dynamite.

A great deal of this has been happening in the Great Barrier Reef, particularly in coral reefs all over the world.

And on coral reefs, where some of the main framework organisms disappear, we will see a major loss of marine biodiversity.

The catastrophic collapse of fish stocks around the world on coral reefs and elsewhere has provided hard lessons about managing fisheries.

104. Welcomes the publication of the Status of Coral Reefs in Tsunami Affected Countries 2005 by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network

To reduce the loss of coral reefs by half would cost about 3 billion each year and yield at least 72 billion in benefits.

This began to change when China initiated an active policy of dredging sand to fill in reefs and build islands in at least five locations.

The people in Chicago decided that as well as exhibiting our reefs, what they wanted to do was have the local people there make a reef.

But business as usual means that in 50 years, there may be no coral reefs and no commercial fishing, because the fish will simply be gone.

One of the most commonly found species is the black coral ( Pocillopora damicornis ) Large corals are rare and mostly found at the bottom of the reefs.

Ocean acidification is a really big issue that people are concerned with, as well as ocean warming, and the effects they're going to have on coral reefs.

But it turns out there is a very good reason why we are crocheting it because many organisms in coral reefs have a very particular kind of structure.

This means that once predator species become depleted, fishing pressure shifts towards plant eating fish species, leading to precipitous declines in the numbers of herbivores on coral reefs.

Most of the reefs are dead, most of the corals are dead overgrown by algae and most of the fish are smaller than the pencils we use to count them.

At a global level, biodiversity loss has not been significantly reduced, and major ecosystems such as forests, wetlands and coral reefs are placed under increasing pressure from destruction and degradation.

56. Urges States and relevant global and regional bodies to enhance their cooperation in the protection and preservation of coral reefs, mangroves and seagrass beds, including through the exchange of information

77. Urges States and relevant global and regional bodies to enhance their cooperation in the protection and preservation of mangroves, seagrass beds and coral reefs, including through the exchange of information

On coral reefs, these no take zones can help insure that a portion of coral reef habitat sustains a healthy fish community, and secure the coral reef resilience that this brings.

This figure is far higher than levels of protection in even the wealthiest countries that harbor significant coral reefs, the US and Australia, where current levels of protection are less than 5 .

Climate change According to an analysis by Tim Flannery, the ecosystem of Lord Howe Island is threatened by climate change and global warming, with the reefs at risk from rises in water temperature.

Second, we must restore coral reefs' capacity to cope with environmental change their resilience by protecting the fish stocks that keep seaweed in check, and thereby facilitate the recovery of coral populations from bleaching.

51. Reiterates its call for urgent consideration of ways to integrate and improve, on a scientific basis, the management of risks to the marine biodiversity of seamounts, cold water coral reefs and certain other underwater features

It is predicted that the Great Barrier Reef and reefs surrounding Lord Howe Island could be killed as a result of the rise in water temperature forecast by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report.