DR. RUTH GATES, DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE OF MARINE BIOLOGY, UNIVESITY OF HAWAII:

In 1998, 18 percent of the world’s reefs died as a result of a global bleaching event.

Many people believe that we no lost up to 30 percent of the world’s reefs. Another 30 percent are critically endangered. And the potential for us to see massive degradation in all reef habitats worldwide is high by 2015.

What we now know with our climate changing is our water warming and the water is becoming more acidic. And these are two stressors that are extremely difficult for coral to cope with. The rates of change are so fast because of our intervention.

The changes in those colors that occur when the coral’s health declines and the image becomes paler and paler and more washed out. And you can see it. It evokes an emotional reaction in all of us.

What we are trying to do here is to leverage 25 years of basic scientific knowledge that gives us inkling that coral is perhaps a little bit more flexible in their biology than we would think. That there are certain individuals that are doing surprisingly well in conditions that are killing others.

So we’re interested in focusing on those corals and then thinking about how we might build capacity or breed corals that are better able to withstand future ocean conditions, that is warmer and more acidic.

I’m all about taking my skill set and applying to an area that I can, and that is in the area of climate change adaptation. What happens if we don’t mitigate fast enough that fossil fuel burning. What do we do? And the solution is to attempt to assist corals to adapt or acclimatize to the changes at a rate that matches the rate of change in the environment.

We have no magic bullet answer. We are at the early stages of this project and we are trying a lot of things.

We’ve done some pretty amazing things to do damage to the planet. But is our M.O. to react and then amend and set the course right.

Let’s not be bogged down or paralyzed by the enormity of the problem. We are doing with corals what nature does. We’re just trying to accelerate the rate which they do it to keep up with the very fast rates of change in the environment.

That’s the only way that we’re going to forward.