Marine Science and Global Environmental Policy

The degradation of Earth’s coral reef ecosystems has environmental and socio-economic consequences of importance to fisheries, food security, shoreline stability, tourism, and economic development options. Since our planet’s history suggests that thousands to millions of years have been necessary for coral reefs to recover from similar past collapses, a key question that deserves an immediate response is ‘Can we afford further degradation? Coral reef ecosystems in the Caribbean are particularly at risk. The well-documented loss of coral cover throughout the region, and the increased abundance of macroalgae in many locations provide strong evidence of systems undergoing major changes in species composition, physical structure, and function. The causes of modern coral reef degradation are numerous and can differ from one location to the next, but experts agree that humans have played and continue to play a major role in this decline.  As concerned citizens representing a variety of geographical locales from both the private and public sectors, the participants of The University of Texas workshop held in September 2015 wish to voice our concerns and recommendations for how to proceed with the conservation of coral reefs and other associated coastal environments. Although we acknowledge the alignment of our views with statements and resolutions of the US Coral Reef Task Force, we still wish to reformulate and emphasize some important points. As a group we concluded that the main challenge we face is determining how to bring the best science and management actions together to assist in ecosystem recovery. We believe this would be best achieved through the regional replication of locally implemented management measures that take advantage of the natural resilient capabilities of coral reefs. Workshop participants from Colombia, México, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands concluded that increased seawater temperatures, particularly by rendering susceptibility to disease outbreaks, and land-based sources of pollution represent two of the most pressing causes for coral reef degradation in each of these areas. Participants agreed that Caribbean-wide reductions of some key coral reef stressors can be achieved through local actions and watershed-scale management efforts.