Coral reefs support the highest marine biodiversity on Earth, and their bleaching and collapse creates mass animal welfare crises across thousands of species.
Coral bleaching welfare involves the slow death of billions of reef organisms: the coral animals themselves as they expel zooxanthellae and starve, and the fish and invertebrate communities that lose habitat and food sources. Individual fish experience shelter loss, predation exposure, and starvation as their reef habitat collapses. The welfare scale of reef decline — affecting millions of individual organisms across thousands of species — makes climate change mitigation the highest-leverage single intervention for marine welfare.