Coral reef experts press on, with climate looming over international conference

AUCKLAND — Lest anyone think scientific conferences must be staid affairs, the International Coral Reefs Symposium closed with inspiration from none other than U.S. rap metal band Rage Against the Machine, known for revolutionary lyrics in the 1990s:

“It has to start somewhere.
It has to start sometime.
What better place than here?
What better time than now?
All hell can’t stop us now!”

Christian Voolstra, a professor at the University of Konstanz in Germany and president of the International Coral Reef Society (ICRS), which organizes the conference, choked up as he read those lyrics at the closing ceremony, as did this reporter.

Reflections on how conference participants could address the many threats to coral reefs, including seas that are becoming hotter and more acidic due to climate change, had punctuated the program of more narrowly focused presentations on research and conservation practice during the conference, held July 19-24 in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand.

This 16th iteration of the conference, which takes place every four years, drew more than 2,100 participants from more than 90 countries, including coral reef scientists, conservationists, policymakers and community leaders. (Previous ICRS conferences held in locations nearer to Global North research hubs drew even more people.)

Recurring themes in conference discussions included how much to focus on climate mitigation, how to characterize and communicate the current condition of coral reefs, and how to empower Indigenous communities and integrate their knowledge systems.

Prioritizing climate?

The mammoth challenge of stabilizing the climate was outside the purview of most of the discussions in Auckland, though some participants sought to keep it front and center. Generally, they suggested that scientists and conservationists should translate technical work for broader use and engage in climate policy debates, build coalitions or make collective statements, and reduce emissions from research projects or conservation interventions.

Robert Streit, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia, called for more integration of climate into conference discussions, saying it often received little more than a quick disclaimer at the beginning of presentations. He said he sensed that compared to the 2022 ICRS symposium, presenters were quicker to narrow the focus, leaving climate outside their aperture, with some taking an implicit attitude that “change is now baked in.”

“That seems to be a recurring rationale to then say: ‘of course, we have to deal with climate change, but that’s someone else’s job,’” Streit told Mongabay, while acknowledging that he might have noticed the trend more in 2026 because he was looking for it. He’s the lead author of a 2025 paper that cautions that funding and political attention could be diverted from climate mitigation toward technological interventions, though he doesn’t oppose such interventions per se.

While many of the smaller talks didn’t focus on climate mitigation, some of the keynote speeches and press conferences did. For example, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, an emeritus professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, spoke passionately about the need for climate action. Decades ago, his research accurately predicted the damage to reefs that climate change would bring, and he received the Darwin Medal, the ICRS’s highest honor, at the conference. He’s long called for coral reef scientists and conservationists to engage in climate policy debates.

Catherine McFadden, a professor at Harvey Mudd College in the U.S. and an expert in soft corals, said that roughly 20 years ago, there was a sense that climate change was “a bigger problem than any one of us as coral reef scientists can tackle [and] we need to leave that to other agencies.”

“Whereas now, what we’re hearing this week, it’s those global changes … aren’t happening fast enough … and it’s up to us to really wade in there and do what we can do to tackle that global climate change problem,” she told Mongabay.

She said that small-scale and local solutions, while important, “aren’t going to cut it.”

Even some scientists deeply involved in coral restoration and regeneration work emphasized the need for climate action. Kate Quigley, a research fellow at James Cook University (JCU) in Australia whose work deals with population genetics, told Mongabay that even advanced techniques to improve corals’ heat tolerance — selective breeding, moving heat-tolerant corals or their offspring between reefs, or manipulating their algal partners in a kind of laboratory-directed evolution — have limits. She said such interventions were “not a ‘get out of jail free’ card, not a silver bullet.”

“It must be about emissions reductions — bottom line, period,” she said. “And I spend a lot of time looking at other things, but I just keep coming back to that. These are not habitable oceans for corals if we continue business as usual.”

The role of climate change was particularly relevant at this year’s ICRS because an El Niño event is already underway and is expected to strengthen in late 2026, warming waters at many coral reefs worldwide. Such events are part of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle in the Pacific Ocean that helps drive weather patterns around the world, and this one is expected to be unusually strong.

“There is an 81% chance of a very strong El Niño during October-December that would rank among the largest El Niño events in the historical record going back to 1950,” a recent U.S. National Weather Service advisory states.

Morgan Pratchett, a professor of marine ecology at JCU, told reporters at the conference: “It’s a very high likelihood that we’ll see very severe, large-scale mass bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef.”

David Obura, a marine ecologist, founder of Kenyan marine research nonprofit Coastal Oceans Research and Development—Indian Ocean East Africa and chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, pointed to the need for political and economic change in his speech during the conference’s closing ceremony. Global threats to corals, including climate change, destructive fishing and pollution, are “all consequences of our global economic system,” he said.

Voolstra, the ICRS president, speaking just after Obura, said: “For a long time, we were all entirely comfortable with producing the best science possible, and then we left it to others to act upon it. I think it’s not enough to generate the evidence, publish it and communicate it … We have to make an effort to go to these places where these decisions are basically debated or made.”

Yet, for all the climate discussion in the conference’s biggest settings, scientists at the Auckland conference didn’t issue a joint, public-facing call to action on climate change or other global threats to coral reefs, as they’d done at the 2008 and 2012 ICRS conferences.

What’s the reef situation?

Coral reef ecosystems rival tropical forests in their complexity, so trying to monitor their health is no easy task. At ICRS in Auckland, scientists differed slightly in how they characterized the global condition of coral reefs and offered various opinions on how it should be communicated to the public.

Some experts focused on the overarching bad news. Coral reefs have suffered four mass bleaching events since 1998, each leading to a huge loss in live coral cover. Bleaching occurs when corals expel symbiotic algae from their tissues in response to high temperatures or other stressors, losing their color in the process; it can kill corals if prolonged or repeated.

And yet there were elements of good news that some scientists sought to highlight. Many reef ecosystems have regained live coral cover following these losses. For example, many saw strong gains in the roughly six years in between the mass bleaching events of 2014-2017 and 2023-2025. But some scientists in Auckland cautioned that such resilience may not last as heat waves become more intense and frequent.

One reason characterizing reefs’ general state is hard is that even defining reef health is hard, with scientists such as Streit calling for more holistic measures that focus less on coral cover than do metrics now in widespread use.

Pratchett of JCU also called for a broad perspective, saying that biodiversity considerations should shape reef management decisions.

“Reducing biodiversity makes these systems ever more vulnerable to these major disturbances,” he told reporters at the conference. “So we need to be focusing not only on changes in coral cover and coral composition, but be thinking a lot more about the inherent resilience that’s provided by having high biodiversity.”

Several scientists emphasized that reefs are especially vulnerable when they face multiple threats at the same time, such as localized pollution from wastewater and warming seas due to climate change.

In the hallways, attendees also debated whether there was too much “doom and gloom” in the coral reef community, or rather too much false optimism.

One leading scientist offered both a dire warning and a hopeful message. David Suggett is a professor and project director at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, where some of the leading coral restoration techniques are being developed. His team has launched what he described in a press conference as “the world’s largest coral farm … 10 times the size of existing coral farms.”

In making the case for restoration, which some experts maintain can never occur at a meaningful scale, Suggett told reporters, “Do you want to have coral reefs in the next 10 years, or do you not? It’s quite a black and white choice.”

In a keynote speech on the conference’s final day, Suggett said the world is approaching “the industrial revolution for reef restoration in a sense. So the future, in my eyes, is extremely bright.”

Indigenous knowledge and community voices

Many of the week’s talks demonstrated or emphasized the role of Indigenous leadership in coral reef research and conservation. Dan Hikuroa, a professor of Māori and Pacific studies at the University of Auckland, gave the first keynote describing Māori ideas about “being a good ancestor” — making decisions with an intergenerational mindset — and on blending Indigenous knowledge with science.

The speech from Hikuroa, who is of Ngāti Maniapoto, Waikato-Tainui and Ngaati Whanaunga descent, drew praise from other Indigenous participants. Uʻilani Naipo, a cultural and natural-resource advocate and lineal descendant of families from Miloliʻi on Hawaiʻi Island who works to advance place-based marine governance and protect Native Hawaiian traditional and customary practices, said the speech made her feel “appreciated.”

“For me, it was a welcoming message because when conferences like this are very highly technical science, finding the right niche for community voice is sometimes very awkward,” Naipo told Mongabay.

Obura, in his closing speech, celebrated “the growing message and recognition of a diversity of voices.” Referring to a phrase often used in discussions about Indigenous self-determination and co-governance, he said, “Here I heard a mantra that is increasingly common: ‘nothing about us without us.’”

One presentation on Indigenous leadership was by Brody Gray and Stirling Ludwick, two land and sea rangers who work in the “Sea Country” around the Great Barrier Reef near Yarrabah, Australia. Gray, who is Gunggandji, and Ludwick, who is of Mandingalbay Yidinji descent, have in recent years monitored corals and other marine wildlife, among other responsibilities. They work for the Gunggandji–Mandingalbay Yidinji Peoples Prescribed Body Corporate Aboriginal Corporation, a Traditional Owner-controlled nonprofit. They said they hoped one day rangers would be working across the entire Great Barrier Reef.

Many presenters emphasized the importance of empowering local people and connected this effort to reef conservation. Sangeeta Mangubhai, a research scientist and consultant based in Fiji who previously served as country director for the U.S.-based nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Society, told reporters at the conference that “reefs are only as resilient as the communities that are managing them.”

Announcements

Two announcements made at the conference stood out.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), a U.S.-based research nonprofit, announced the launch of the WHOI Schiller Center for Reef Solutions. The center, which is virtual, “will bring together expertise from scientists and engineers from across WHOI working in robotics, data science, chemistry, ecology, physics, acoustics and other areas of coral reef-related science and technology development, including marine policy,” a press release says. The funding for the new center comes from a single $25 million donation — the largest philanthropic commitment WHOI has received for coral reef work.^[1]

And Greg Asner, head of the Allen Coral Atlas and the Global Airborne Observatory, two linked conservation technology initiatives, announced in a keynote that his team is undertaking the first-ever high-resolution mapping of living corals for the Pacific Ocean. This builds on his team’s earlier work producing maps of shallow tropical coral reef habitats across the world. The new mapping initiative enables users to see individual corals and “how much coral is in every pixel within the reef,” not just where the reef habitats are located, Asner told Mongabay, saying this is akin to seeing trees rather than just forests. His team has already collected data from flights and dives around Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands and plans to map Palau next. (Disclosure: Asner is married to a Mongabay board member.)

The next International Coral Reef Symposium will take place in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in July 2030.

Banner image: A conference attendee. Image courtesy of Smoke Event Photography. 

Citation:

Streit, R. P., Morrison, T. H., & Bellwood, D. R. (2025). Reconciling urgency and restraint in the coral climate crisis: A philosophy of practice. Cell Reports Sustainability, 2(11), 100529. doi:10.1016/j.crsus.2025.100529

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Cite this article

Edward Carver (2026). Coral reef experts press on, with climate looming over international conference. Mongabay Conservation news. DOI: https://doi.org/10.66709/news-325038

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Rebecca Kessler Editor

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