coral reefs are not just a pretty face coral reefs provide a really incredibly important services to people all across the tropics and subtropics including food you know income for tourism Etc but also Shoreline protection without the structure of the coral reef off the coast of many islands waves and the effects of sea level rise will be much greater core bleaching is what is the paling or whitening of corals that happens when they're exposed to really warm temperatures and it happens because corals themselves are made up of both the the animal the coral animal and these
little tiny plants that live in the animal's tissues and give them most of its energy when corals bleach it basically happens that when corals are exposed unusually warm water or some other sort of extreme environmental conditions the coral either consumes or expels the little algae and since the algae you're giving the coral most of its color without the algae the corals look white the problem is when corals are bleached they're effectively being starved to death in a bleaching lasts for long enough without enough food the corals are going to die and without living corals on
a reef yeah the reef itself is going to break down over time you need living corals both to build the structure of the reef but also to provide the habitat for all for fish and all the other organisms that live there listen coral reefs are existentially threatened by climate change they are the canaries in the in the coal mine here this is a coral reefs with more than one and a half degrees of warming are at threat of being degraded all around the world and there are things that we can do we can reduce the
local pressures on coral reefs we can be more careful when we go um we visit them as tourists and everything but none of that's going to matter if we don't do enough to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
