Reef Corals Face Extinction Due to Global Warming, Over-Fishing

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Reef Corals Face Extinction Due to Global Warming, Over-Fishing

By Alex Morales

July 10 (Bloomberg) -- A third of reef-building corals face extinction as global warming adds to other man-made threats including over-fishing and coastal development.

A team of 39 researchers assessed the state of 704 coral species and found 32.8 percent are threatened with extinction. The study results, published today in the journal Science, are ``worse than expected,'' said co-author Suzanne Livingstone, a marine biologist at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

``When we began this process, we didn't think it would be anywhere near as high as that,'' Livingstone, also a marine species assessor for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said yesterday in a telephone interview. ``Climate change is the overarching threat which comes in on a much larger, global scale,'' adding to localized disturbances, she said.

The fate of corals is crucial to the livelihoods of millions of coastal dwellers around the world. Reefs are worth about $30 billion a year to the global economy, through tourism, fisheries and coastal protection, according to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a United-Nations supervised study published in 2005.

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