Rebuilding Coral Reefs

According to Knowlton et al., This document seeks to highlight the urgency of taking action to conserve and restore reefs through protection and management measures, to provide a summary of the most relevant and recent natural and social science that provides guidance on these tasks, and to highlight implications of these findings for the numerous discussions and negotiations taking place at the global level. This document presents the most important messages from scientists regarding the conservation, management, and restoration of coral reefs as related to three critical and interlinked areas of international policy Climate Change, Biodiversity, and Sustainable Development.

This year is a critical decision moment for the coming decade: a raft of biodiversity and sustainable development targets expired in 2020, a new framework for biodiversity under the Convention on Biological Diversity is being negotiated, and there is a drive to increase ambitions for addressing climate change with submission of revised Nationally Determined Contributions under the next UN Climate Change Conference (COP26). In addition, the newly launched UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development and UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration provide the opportunity to galvanise the science and policies needed to reverse reef decline.