Marine heatwaves are driving unprecedented coral bleaching events, causing mass mortality of coral reef ecosystems and the billions of animals that depend on them.
Coral reef bleaching and death represents welfare harm at ecosystem scale - billions of fish, invertebrates, and other marine animals lose habitat, food sources, and breeding grounds. The animals that depend on coral reefs experience starvation, predation exposure, and reproductive failure when reefs collapse. The direct cause is ocean warming from anthropogenic climate change, making individual climate action and systemic emissions reduction the primary welfare interventions. Reef restoration is valuable but cannot substitute for the scale of climate mitigation required to protect reef ecosystems.