2023–2025 Global Coral Bleaching Event: A Wake-Up Call for Ocean Conservation

The 2023–2025 global coral bleaching event is an ongoing environmental disaster that represents the most extensive coral bleaching incident in recorded history, affecting approximately 84% of the Earth’s coral reef ecosystems.

This event, announced by the International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI) in April 2025, surpassed the previous 2014–17 event, which impacted roughly two-thirds of global reefs. Coral reefs in the territories of at least eighty-two nations suffered enough thermal stress to undergo bleaching. The ongoing event, which began in February 2023, has been primarily attributed to escalating ocean temperatures associated with anthropogenic climate change, with marine researchers stating that there was no clear indication of when it might conclude. The severity of the bleaching event prompted the NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch program to expand its bleaching alert scale with three additional categories to accurately represent the unprecedented risk of coral mortality. On October 2024, the United Nations convened an extraordinary emergency session alongside the COP16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia to determine potential future responses to the bleaching event.