Resilience of Red Sea coral holds key to marine conservation

Millennia after religious texts first began to recount the Crossing of the Red Sea, the waterway retains an unparalleled level of cultural and geopolitical significance in the Middle East.

Since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the Red Sea has formed a gateway between the Arabian and Mediterranean Seas.

In more recent years, the area has evolved into an arena for competition between regional and world powers such as Iran, Israel, Russia, and the United States. Today, the Red Sea serves as a front in yet another battle: the war on climate change.

"The corals of the Red Sea uphold marine habitats that feed peoples across the region and host fisheries valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time, the Red Sea’s coral reefs have turned into a tourist attraction for locals and foreigners alike, bolstering a region-wide industry worth billions of dollars"

Scientists have found that corals in the Gulf of Aqaba, an offshoot of the Red Sea touching Egypt, Israel, and Jordan, demonstrate unique resilience in the face of global warming.

Descended from heat-resistant corals in much warmer corners of the Red Sea, such as the Gulf of Aden, corals in the Gulf of Aqaba have an innate ability to withstand higher temperatures.

As climate change warms the world’s oceans, corals in the Red Sea have a major advantage.

Global warming has set in motion a mass extinction that could see 90 percent of the world’s corals disappear before 2050.

Given that as much as a fourth of all ocean life depends on coral for its own survival, the devastation portended by such an extinction event remains difficult to overstate.

Coral reefs also play roles in sustaining ecosystems such as mangrove thickets and seagrass meadows, which, in turn, absorb carbon dioxide and prevent it from contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Day by day, global warming is upending this delicate balance.

In addition to supporting sea life and the natural environment as a whole, the coral provides critical economic and social benefits to humanity.

The corals of the Red Sea uphold marine habitats that feed peoples across the region and host fisheries valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. At the same time, the Red Sea’s coral reefs have turned into a tourist attraction for locals and foreigners alike, bolstering a region-wide industry worth billions of dollars.

Countries bordering the Red Sea appear well aware of coral’s importance and have even used it to market themselves to potential visitors. The Egyptian Tourism Authority’s website boasts of “incredibly beautiful coral reefs” in the Red Sea resort city of Hurghada and “amazing coral reefs” in the neighbouring resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh.

Meanwhile, the website of the Red Sea Governorate, of which Hurghada serves as the capital, highlights its “rich fauna and flora, particularly coral reefs and numerous fish species with a big number of unique marine habitats.”

In 2020, an experiment headed by Maoz Fine, an Israeli expert on the ecology of coral reefs, determined that some corals in the Gulf of Aqaba could withstand increases in temperature of up to 7 degrees Celsius.

Scientists now hope that the Red Sea corals’ unique properties can improve the durability of coral reefs across the world. Proposals include transplanting species from the Gulf of Aqaba to other regions or helping other species of coral evolve similar traits.

Despite the promise that Red Sea corals hold, they face their own challenges. A 2020 report by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, a coalition backed by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the Regional Organization for the Conservation of the Environment of the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden (PERSGA), recorded a slight decline in the average “cover of live hard coral and algae” in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, from 36.1 percent in 1997 to 34.3 percent in 2019. Egyptian divers have also reported coral bleaching.

Red Sea corals can only support efforts at marine conservation if they themselves survive climate change. For that reason, countries in the region are taking steps to avert the ecological crisis that would ensue if even the corals of the Red Sea fell to global warming.

Egypt is working with the UNEP to curb what the UNEP calls “tourism-related risks” to Red Sea corals. Jordan has gone as far as collaborating with the UN Development Program to grow artificial coral reefs in a bid to draw tourists away from more sensitive, natural reefs in the Gulf of Aqaba.

International organizations such as the UN and PERSGA seem best positioned to organize a more effective, multi-country campaign to secure the corals of the Red Sea. However, regional tensions appear set to complicate any such attempt at cross-border cooperation.

Few PERSGA member states look likely to follow in the footsteps of Jordan. Over a decade ago, Jordan and Israel conducted joint research on the Gulf of Aqaba with funding from the North Atlantic Treating Organization, better known as NATO.

On the other hand, Saudi Arabia, host to PERSGA and the wealthiest Red Sea country, has proved reluctant to admit Israeli researchers into its territorial waters despite the formidable expertise of Fine and other scholars.

Upheaval in the PERSGA member states of Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen will further undermine hopes for a region-wide effort at marine conservation. Nonetheless, even a partnership just between Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia will go a long way toward saving their coral reefs.

The corals of the Red Sea may hold the key to marine conservation across the world. Even so, climate change means that these corals will also need their own protection for years to come.

Austin Bodetti is a writer specialising in the Arab world. His work has appeared in The Daily Beast, USA Today, Vox, and Wired