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It looked like snow under water: white, endless, and still. The reef, my friend Lisbeth said, was “the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.” For a second, I almost agreed. Then, I stared at it for a long time before replying. She wasn’t wrong about its beauty. But she was also showing me death. Bleached coral isn’t a kind of coral. It’s the moment just after the funeral, what’s left when life is gone. A cathedral of bone-white skeletons stretching over an empire of calcified death. From above, it glows like marble. Up close, it’s a graveyard.

Unless global heating is reduced to 1.2C ‘as fast as possible’, warm water coral reefs will not remain ‘at any meaningful scale’, a report by 160 scientists from 23 countries warns

The Kenyan marine ecologist David Obura is chair of a panel of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the world’s leading natural scientists. For many decades, his speciality has been corals, but he has warned that the next generation may not see their glory because so many reefs are now “flickering out across the world”.

If our next federal government wants to save the reef, it must tackle the main reason it is in trouble by phasing out fossil fuel use and exports as quickly as possible. Otherwise it’s like putting bandaids on an arterial wound.

The world’s coral reef cover has halved since the 1950s, ravaged by global heating, overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction, according to an analysis of thousands of reef surveys. From the 1,430-mile (2,300km) Great Barrier Reef in Australia to the Saya de Malha Bank in the Indian Ocean, coral reefs and the diversity of fish species they support are in steep decline, a trend that is projected to continue as the planet continues to heat in the 21st century.

the court found that one million of today’s Australian children are expected to be hospitalised because of a heat-stress episode, that substantial economic loss will be experienced, and that the Great Barrier Reef and most of Australia’s eucalypt forest won’t exist when they grow up. It found this harm is real, catastrophic, and – importantly from a legal perspective – “reasonably foreseeable”.

Sea ice land. 7 Tipping points are analysed here. Climate tipping points, elements of the Earth system in which small changes in global temperature can kick off reinforcing loops that ‘tip’ a system into a profoundly different state, accelerating heat waves, permafrost thaw, and coastal flooding — and, in some cases, fueling more warming.

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Des dizaines de milliers de déchets plastiques polluant la planète sont générés par une poignée de multinationales dont Coca-Cola, Nestlé ou encore Pepsico, a assuré Break Free from Plastics, une coalition mondiale d'ONG, dans un rapport publié mercredi à Manille.