Listen to this essay

When summer arrived along Florida’s coastline in 2023, marine scientists nervously watched and waited as seawater temperatures steadily increased in unexpected ways. The data streaming in from monitoring devices appeared to show a vast marine heatwave stretching from Cape Canaveral to the farthest reaches of Key West. How hot could it get?

Marine heatwaves are getting longer and more intense, but the heat can sometimes be dispersed by wind, which allows layers of warmer and cooler water to mix. However, in 2023, the winds were weak off the coast of Florida. It was a recipe for disaster. ‘We knew it was going to be bad,’ the marine scientist Liv Williamson told me. ‘But we didn’t know just how much.’

It would become Florida’s hottest summer on record. The water in Manatee Bay, near Key Largo, reached 38.4 degrees Celsius, which remains the highest ocean temperature ever recorded. The sheer intensity of the event caught marine scientists off guard. ‘It was so early, so hot,’ Williamson said, ‘and it just stayed.’ As the heatwave settled into bays and lagoons, corals began to die.

At the time, Williamson was working as a biologist and ecologist at the University of Miami’s Coral Reef Futures Lab, studying the reefs in Florida and testing innovative strategies to increase the survival and fitness of threatened Caribbean corals.

She knew the response needed to be swift. And so, like other scientists in the region, Williamson made plans to remove threatened coral species directly from the reef. She and her colleagues mobilised volunteers and boats, and secured aquarium tanks to house collected fragments. This kind of operation is not cheap. Williamson and others quickly applied for funding from national institutions. There was another roadblock, too. Removing corals from Florida’s reefs requires permits. The reef is a highly regulated zone bound by rules designed to prevent overfishing, protect endangered species, and stop harvesting for the illegal aquarium trade. Even corals experiencing a thermal emergency are protected by the law.

But funding and permits move more slowly than marine heatwaves. By the time the money arrived and permission had been granted, it was ‘too late,’ Williamson said.

Bleaching has affected 84 per cent of coral reefs in at least 83 countries and territories, and is still unfolding

When she finally went out to collect fragments – including from some large, 100-year-old colonies that she had worked with and studied for years – she found a decimated reef. ‘To see these big, beautiful corals bleach and dissolve before your eyes in the course of a few weeks was incredibly challenging,’ Williamson said. ‘You dedicate your career to this, and then watch it all die despite your best efforts. It makes you question everything.’

The devastation she witnessed in Florida turned out to be the beginning of the fourth global bleaching event – now the most severe and widespread ever recorded. Already, it has affected 84 per cent of coral reefs in at least 83 countries and territories, and it is still unfolding.

The heat is a problem. But for scientists like Williamson who hope to restore coral reefs, the issue is not just the unprecedented temperatures – or even rising emissions. Our blue planet, they say, is being choked by red tape. According to restoration practitioners, some of the greatest threats to the future of corals are the legal frameworks governing how species are handled, relocated, and propagated. This is a view shared by many of those on the frontlines of the climate crisis, who suspect that the law may be hindering the long-term viability of Earth’s ecosystems. Rules and regulations now limit the applications of new genetic technologies and techniques, including the development of hybrid lab-grown species that may be more tolerant of warmer ocean temperatures. As one leading coral scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science told me: ‘All the fancy technologies in the world don’t really matter if at the end of the day you are not allowed to apply them.’

Elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata) seen in June 2023 and later in September 2023. Photo courtesy Ross Cunning/Shedd Aquarium

For the past two decades, I’ve been studying the socio-legal and ecological complexities entangled with conservation and restoration projects. During the third global coral bleaching event, which ran from 2014-17, I became interested in the ways that corals were becoming important testing grounds for new approaches to governance. I interviewed dozens of scientists, including Ruth Gates, who was the director of the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology and a pioneer of human-assisted coral evolution. She helped develop the first genetically altered ‘super corals’ that were more tolerant of heat and gave hope that reefs might endure. Through our many conversations, Gates became a key collaborator, who helped me understand the cutting edge of coral science and possible futures for reefs. After she died unexpectedly in 2018, I stepped away from the field.

What drew me back was the Reef Futures conference held in Mexico in December 2024. When I started working with coral restoration experts a decade earlier, their community was tiny and mostly ostracised in the world of established coral conservation, which had been long dominated by older white male scientists from wealthy countries. In those early years, the restorationists were typically younger professionals, many of whom were women emerging from the heatwave trenches. By 2024, this community had grown so much that it was almost unrecognisable: it had become a network of thousands of professionals from around the world, including scientists as well as people from local communities who often turned their lives around to respond to the urgent problems on reefs. The Reef Futures conference was described as ‘the only global symposium focused solely on the interventions and actions necessary to allow coral reefs to thrive into the next century.’ It was here that I first met Williamson, whose presentation caught my attention. When I later sat down and heard her story of the Florida heatwave, I began to grasp how questions of governance were once again entangling with conservation and restoration projects.

International law is poorly suited to the urgency and complexity of the devastation caused by climate change

For many practitioners, the grief of seeing corals die is compounded by the knowledge that some losses could have been prevented if only regulators had acted faster. Permits withheld at critical moments, lengthy review processes, and conflicting jurisdictional requirements have resulted in deep frustrations among coral practitioners toward governments and their regulatory apparatuses. For many coral practitioners, the law appears inadequately prepared to protect reef ecosystems threatened by climate change.

Florida’s reef crisis in the summer of 2023 is a clear example. Various agencies with concurrent authority created layers of review and extensive procedures and so by the........

© Aeon