Hope and Hard Choices

Coral restoration efforts are growing. Scientists breed heat-tolerant coral strains through selective reproduction and assisted gene flow. Coral nurseries grow fragments on underwater structures before transplanting them to degraded reefs. Some projects use electrical currents to accelerate calcium carbonate deposition on artificial structures.

But restoration cannot scale fast enough to replace what warming destroys. Growing a reef takes decades. Destroying one takes a single prolonged heat event. The math only works if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius, giving reefs time to adapt and restoration efforts time to work.