For 20 years now, Ken Nedimyer has been strapping on his scuba gear and diving into the waters off the Florida coast in a desperate effort to restore coral reefs that have been decimated by climate change and pollution. In 2019, he founded his latest venture, Reef Renewal USA. The group’s YouTube channel shows Nedimyer and other members underwater, carefully attaching nursery-grown coral to structures designed to build healthy reefs.

“We’re working hard under pressure with innovation, speed, and efficiency to repopulate our coral reefs,” the narrator says.

Diver-conservationists like Nedimyer will lose the race against time, scientists say, unless humanity acts quickly to end emissions of climate-warming pollution. In the Southern Hemisphere’s Coral Sea, home of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, extreme temperatures have recently hit their highest in 400 years, according to an article in the journal Nature.

“If we don’t divert from our current course, our generation will likely witness the demise of one of Earth’s great natural wonders, the Great Barrier Reef,” paleoclimatologist Ben Henley at the University of Melbourne told the New York Times.

‘Out of sight’

According to a 2023 Pew Research poll, a majority of Americans consider global warming to be a major threat. If you drill down a bit and ask this group which ecosystem most concerns them, odds are they’ll cite tropical rainforests, or maybe alpine areas or the Arctic tundra.

And they’re not wrong to be concerned about these important communities. But our terrestrial bias blinds us to what is arguably an even more endangered ecosystem lying beneath the ocean’s surface.

“Coral reefs suffer from an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ dilemma,” said Jessica Levy, a marine biologist working for the Florida-based Coral Restoration Foundation.

“What we’re looking at is the potential loss of an entire ecosystem, which we’ve never experienced in human history,” Levy said, “and I don’t think anyone wants to find out what that would mean if we had a complete collapse of our coral-reef ecosystems.”

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