Coral Reefs Near Their Critical Threshold

(MENAFN) What scientists once feared has now become a reality. Warm-water coral reefs, which are among the Earth's most important ecosystems, are crossing a "climate tipping point," according to the Global Tipping Points Report 2025.

This alarming report, compiled by 160 scientists from 23 countries and 87 institutions, was released last week and serves as a crucial wake-up call for a world preoccupied with daily crises and increasingly unaware of the tangible impacts of global warming.

The report stresses that “the world has entered a new reality,” with ecosystems approaching dangerous thresholds as global temperatures are expected to soon exceed the 1.5°C limit.

The possibility of interconnected tipping points propelling humanity toward an irreversible climate disaster has raised significant concerns about what these thresholds mean for the planet's future and whether they might signal the beginning of an irreversible environmental collapse.

One of the most disturbing revelations in the report is that warm-water coral reefs are surpassing their thermal tipping point, experiencing unprecedented dieback, and becoming the first major climate “tipping point” on Earth.

The report highlights that coral reefs are facing “unprecedented mortality” due to frequent mass bleaching events.

Their critical thermal limit, set at 1.2°C above pre-industrial levels, has already been surpassed, and the upper threshold of 1.5°C could be reached in the coming decade.

Tim Lenton, the lead author and professor at the University of Exeter, explained to a news agency that a “tipping point” occurs when changes within a system become “self-propelling” and “hard to reverse,” eventually pushing the system into a new and different state.

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