Question: What is your resaerch trying to find out ?

Sarah-Jane Walsh answered on 27 Jun 2013:

I’m trying to find out if there is a way we can protect coral reefs and the services they provide.

At the moment we have lots of what we call ‘Paper Parks’ this meens the coral reef are protected national parks on paper, but in practice there is no money to actually enforce any of the rules. basically we have bitten off more than we can chew and are trying to protect more then we can handle.

What we want to do is find a way that we can test which reefs we should protect.

We want to choose reefs that have a high value, i.e provide a lot of services such as food, protection, water quality. But that also have the best chance at surviving climate change. There is no point investing all our time, energy and money in to species that physically cannot survive.

So i’m testing what makes corals more resilient to climate change and how can we test this easily in the field, so we can make simple instructions that people can do anywhere in the world to identify priority conservation areas.

This matters because over 7% of the global population are dependent on coral reefs for food an income. Many of these are some of the poorest people in the world, who cannot survive if we lost these reefs.