Days after Hurricanes Irma and Maria struck Puerto Rico in 2017, Ernesto Diaz assembled a team to investigate how the Category 5 storm affected his home. Diaz, then assistant secretary of the federal Department of Natural and Environmental Resources, traveled the coastal region and saw floods popping roofs, denuding forests and floating windows and doors. As a marine scientist familiar with coastline ecosystems, he found something interesting. Communities near coral reefs suffered less damage.
In 2022, the Federal Emergency Management Agency committed $38.6 million to protect Puerto Rico’s ailing coral reefs, marking the beginning of a first-of-its-kind project. This is the first time the agency has funded such recovery by leveraging its Hazard Mitigation Assistance Grant Program, which spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year to help communities rebuild after disasters. Diaz then moved on to Tetra Tech, the contractor implementing the first phase of the effort. “I hope this is a pilot project for what I believe should be the way we protect coastal communities, infrastructure and beaches,” he said. “Everyone sees it. “Everyone knows he is our guardian.”
It is no exaggeration to say that coral reefs face an existential threat due to climate change. If the average global temperature rises by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), by one guess Probably 70 to 90 percent of them will disappear. In November, scientists said About 40% of coral species are already at risk of extinction due to overheated oceans, pollution, disease and other abuses.
For decades, conservationists have been pleading to save these vibrant ecosystems, arguing that this is the right thing to do. Coral reefs support about a quarter of all marine life, drive coastal economies, and provide food and livelihoods for a wide range of populations. Each year, public and private groups provide about $300 million to protect reefs around the world, a fraction of the billions of dollars their advocates long for. “We’ve been reliant on philanthropic funding for a long time,” said Emily Kelly, head of blue carbon at the World Economic Forum. “There was no compelling business case for investing in coral reefs.”
Over the past decade, a small group of U.S. government and university scientists have compiled a series of studies making such claims about their treatments. Through rigorously modeled and peer-reviewed work, they showed that coral reefs protect tens of thousands of people and billions of dollars worth of economic assets every year. They and others are increasingly arguing that if coral reefs are in fact high-performance seawalls, they should be maintained and strengthened with federal disaster funding tens to hundreds of times greater than conservation budgets. Their math has already inspired pilot projects funded by FEMA, the Department of Defense, and insurance giants Swiss Re and Munich Re. Each is based on the logic that if we don’t protect corals, we might as well protect them. .
“It’s kind of a selfish way to look at these ecosystems. We need to maintain them because they protect people,” said Borja G. Reguero, a coastal engineer and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who has co-authored much of the related science. That logic is compelling to emergency authorities and insurance companies, who end up “paying for Katrina and Sandys,” he added.
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The understanding that coral reefs are not only majestic creations but also coastal havens is an inherent understanding of many indigenous peoples’ customs. In Polynesia, for example, communities are built closer to reef-buffered coastlines than otherwise, said James Hench, a physical oceanographer and professor at Duke University’s Nicholas School for the Environment.
Scientists have long understood this as a general principle. Individually, corals are small polyps, but together they form a wall-like structure with a porous, complex surface. In the right location (near the shore or near the waterline), reefs provide a speed bump for waves and storms, dissipating their energy. The effects are sometimes so dramatic that they can be seen from the ground. Diaz says that if you stand on a beach in San Juan, you can easily spot the white wave foam crashing 4,600 feet from shore.
But no one has quantified the benefits of this precisely enough, let alone enough to change policy. About eight years ago, Curt Storlazzi, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey (USGS), began talking with Mike Beck, a marine scientist then employed by The Nature Conservancy, about how to change that. They felt that the science available at the time was too general to attract the attention of governments and insurance companies. To win their support, Storlazzi said, they would need to show in excruciating detail how corals protect “dollars and lives.”
To accomplish this, Beck and Storlazzi brought together a team of scientists from inside and outside government. They set out from scratch to build a model that set aside many of the valuable characteristics of America’s 1,900 miles of coral reefs and quantified only their performance as a flood barrier. This required a thorough merging of academics to simulate wave physics under different storm scenarios for every 10 meters (about 33 feet) of reefed coastline and to understand who and what is on the coastline overlooking it. To strengthen their argument, they relied on the same data and methods used by the insurance and disaster management sectors.
They found that America’s coral reefs protect about 18,000 people and $1.8 billion in economic assets from flooding each year. A 2019 USGS paper and findings published in a 2021 issue of the journal Nature Sustainability found that states with highly developed coastlines, such as Hawaii and Florida, have hundreds of millions of dollars in property value that depend on such protection. In places with low-lying, vulnerable populations, such as the Pacific islands, reefs protect thousands of souls. But scientists said they only had to cut the reef down to about 1 meter, or about 3 feet, and all of it was exposed. Their conclusion: Preserving the yard was a very wise use of money.
When we presented this to federal agencies, the simplicity and exacting spatial detail of the message made an impression. “Our work shows that if there is a hotel, this reef protects the building and the people,” Storlazzi said. “Congress votes on dollars and lives. The fact that we expressed it accurately in terms of dollars and lives really resonated.”
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In the aftermath of Maria, this body of research helped Diaz persuade policymakers to act. In 2020, the Commonwealth became the first jurisdiction in the United States to declare coral reefs “critical infrastructure.” Diaz led a FEMA application arguing that the island’s reefs deserve repairs like other infrastructure, reducing the risk of damage. The resulting compensation will restore approximately 5,000 feet of reef around San Juan. According to FEMA, the loss of coral in the area has resulted in “ongoing coastal flooding and erosion.”
Since then, Hawaii, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and in November the Marianas Islands have also issued similar declarations and said they would seek federal funding for reef repairs. FEMA’s thoughts are bigger too. In a statement to Grist, it designated three other programs that could fund coral protection or restoration, all under the Hazard Mitigation Assistance Grant Program. The program typically spends between $2 billion and $4 billion annually. The Puerto Rico project is the only one funded so far, but experts say other applications are in the works.
The U.S. Department of Defense is also paying attention. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) invested $68 million. effort Invent breakwaters that combine coral or oysters with artificial structures. The Department of Defense says about 1,700 coastal facilities are at risk from extreme weather, shoreline erosion and rising sea levels, and that traditional “grey” infrastructure is increasingly inadequate to protect them.
Emerging science has captured the attention of the insurance industry. Over the past decade, the sector has paid out $300 billion for coastal storm damage, according to insurer AXA. Some industries believe that healthy coral reefs save money. In 2019, reinsurance giants Swiss Re and The Nature Conservancy designed a policy to cover the Mesoamerican reef region along Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. Insurance products sold to local governments stipulate that insurers will pay when winds within a particular area exceed 100 knots (115 mph). The 2020 storm blew past it, sparking $850,000 in spending. This allowed first responders to deploy immediately after a storm and graft thousands of coral fragments onto the reef, increasing the chances of recovery.
Duke’s Hench warns that as coastal defense technology progresses, reefs are immature compared to existing measures. Structures made of concrete or rock have the advantage of knowing the quantity. Engineers, like FEMA, know how to design and what to promise to customers. Coral reefs are complex living organisms, and poor design can lead to unintended consequences. “Let’s say you do a major restoration, and four years later there’s a massive bleaching event that kills a lot of people,” Hench said. “The results are different from traditional engineering thinking. I think we’re in the very early stages of figuring out how to do this and do it cost-effectively.”
Storlazzi agrees that the next step is to collect performance data on coral reefs to judge apples-to-apples against the same metrics used for breakwaters. He said data on the current pilot project will shed light on the way forward as it becomes available.
The scientists behind all this work don’t seem to think the upcoming changes in the White House directly threaten this work. President-elect Donald Trump denies that climate change is caused by human activity, and his conservative governance blueprint, Project 2025, proposes that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration should be “split and scaled back” and that FEMA should curb post-disaster activities. . situation. But Beck points out that extreme weather isn’t going anywhere. Take Hurricanes Helene and Milton as examples, according to early estimates. deal with Damage totaled $50 billion, including in Trump’s home state of Florida.
The group hopes that in this context the demand for cost-effective solutions to protect life and property will continue across political parties. Florida Governor Ron DeSanti recently boost Storlazzi said the modeling he and his colleagues created was a key driver of funding for coral reef restoration. “We’re just trying to save money and lives and do it at a lower cost,” he said.
