Pacific Coral Triangle 'at risk of collapse'

Nora Gamolo in SciDev.net: The Coral Triangle, a roughly triangular marine zone in the Indo-Pacific region that is considered to have the world's richest concentration of marine biodiversity, is facing potential ecological collapse due to heavy pressure inflicted by human activities, according to a new report.

The warning appears in a collaborative study, 'Reefs at Risk Revisited in the Coral Triangle', produced by a consortium led by the World Resources Institute, a global environmental think-tank based in Washington DC, United States.

It serves as a status report on the wellbeing of coral reefs in or near the six countries comprising the triangle. The study aimed to identify where reefs are most threatened and to provide "baseline data to help groups establish and prioritise specific management strategies," Kathleen Reytar, a lead author of the study, told SciDev.Net.

According to the report, 85 per cent of reefs in the Coral Triangle are directly threatened by local human activities such as overfishing, the use of poisons and dynamite in fishing, watershed-based pollution (fertilisers, pesticides and other runoff from the land), and coastal development....

Image by Eurobas, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported