Mass coral bleaching events driven by ocean warming destroy the reef ecosystems that millions of marine animals depend on for food, shelter and reproduction.
Coral bleaching causes immense welfare harm to reef-dependent animals through multiple pathways. Loss of reef structure removes shelter from predation, dramatically increasing survival costs and stress for fish and invertebrates. Food web disruption starves specialist feeders. Spawning aggregation sites are lost, disrupting reproduction. The scale is extraordinary: a single bleaching event can affect thousands of kilometres of reef and the hundreds of millions of individual animals that depend on it. Individual welfare impacts — increased predation, starvation, stress from habitat loss — are real and severe even when they are difficult to observe directly. Climate action is the most important welfare intervention for reef ecosystems.