The Reef That Cannot Recover

The Great Barrier Reef has experienced its worst summer on record. The 2024 bleaching event was the most spatially extensive since records began in 1986. Coral cover in the southern reef declined by one-third. Some individual reefs experienced declines of over 70%. Scientists are warning that "reefs don't have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs." Globally, approximately 50% of coral reefs have been lost in the past three decades. This is not a story about a bad year ...

Gene-edited coral fragments have been successfully deployed in small sections of the reef, engineered to express heat-shock proteins. This is either the beginning of a technological rescue or the confession that we now engineer ecosystems because we cannot stop engineering climates. Probably both.