July 18, 2025 — Concerning news for coral reefs came out this week in University of Hawaiʻi research, while on the same day long-awaited protections for critical habitats offered some hope.
A paper published Monday in the Journal of Geophysical Research found the oceans around Hawai’i will become significantly more acidic throughout the 21st century, based on climate modeling.
That could do enormous harm to ocean organisms that form hard shells and skeletons, such as shellfish and coral, adding another layer of stress for already struggling species. And the scenarios UH researchers used for their models show to what extent carbon emission-driven climate change will make matters worse.
“Until about 2050, it doesn’t matter which scenario we’re on; we are on a path that has been built up over the last 100-plus years,” said Brian Powell, one of the four UH physicists who worked on the paper.
After 2050, however, he said the global carbon output will determine which scenario becomes reality.
“We don’t have to be on the business-as-usual track,” Powell said. “We can try to do better.”
On Monday, the National Marine Fisheries Service also announced protections for habitats around the world critical to endangered coral species, including in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands. The announcement came over a decade after the islands’ initial endangered designation.
David Derrick, one of the lawyers with the Center for Biological Diversity who sued to provide those protections, said that the Endangered Species Act played a vital role in their work. According to him, the law “gives groups leverage to hold the (government’s) … feet to the fire.”