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The Importance of Coral Reefs

Coral reefs are the most valuable marine habitats for over 100 countries around the world. Coral reefs are the most beautiful of all aquatic ecosystems. Coral reefs contain the largest variety of species of marine life in a very tiny area, and produce more living biomass than any other marine ecosystem. Coral reefs provide many free economic and environmental services, including fisheries, tourism, generation of sand for beaches, and protection of the shore from waves, which make them the most valuable of all marine ecosystems in most countries where they occur (and probably more valuable per unit area than any on land as well).

The value of these services typically is several tens of million US dollars per kilometer of shoreline. We receive these services for free as long as the reef is healthy, but once it deteriorates these services severely decline or vanish, and then we must pay vast sums of money to import fish, dredge and move sand, build seawalls, etc.

 Most countries are now slowly killing their reefs in order to gain short term financial profit from them in the form of tourism revenues, fish, sand, and jobs, but are doing so at the long term cost of slowly wiping out the free services and converting reefs from financial resources into economic losses.

Although virtually all long term divers in reefs share our concerns about reef deterioration, this deterioration has been often denied by those with inadequate experience and by those who are making money from reef tourism, fisheries, and consulting for developers. Such denial by those who are benefiting economically from reefs only acts to speed up their demise, and makes sites like this one documenting worldwide reef problems essential.