PERSPECTIVE
Coral reef science and the new commons
R. H. Bradbury Æ R. M. Seymour
Received: 12 April 2009 / Accepted: 4 August 2009 / Published online: 23 August 2009

Springer-Verlag 2009
Keywords Global change
Globalisation

Anthropocene
Ecosystem collapse
We humans have inadvertently triggered the emergence of
a new Earth system: a new geological epoch called the
Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2007). It is
replacing the Holocene, the epoch in which civilisation
evolved. Coral reefs, together with all other ecosystems on
the planet, are being swept up in this change.
The changes are so complex that they are overwhelming
the ability of traditional science to comprehend them, and
their consequences are so profound that they demand a new
compact between science and society. This compact, we
shall argue, is really an old one, but one, nevertheless, that
is new to coral reef science. Coral reef science is doomed
to irrelevance unless it embraces it.
In this view, the issue is not to ‘save’ coral reef ecosystems
from humans but to reshape them to survive the Anthropo-
cene together with humans—it is not to conserve species as
an end in itself but to retain useful system functions and
hence fitness for their joint purpose with humans.
This is not to rail against science itself. Coral reefs, like
many ecosystems, face an existential crisis, and science is
vital to its resolution. But, if there is to be a resolution, it will
not be in the way that many reef scientists currently believe.
Rather, the solution will be through new science built on an
old compact with society. This optimistic compact describes
the ‘how and why’ of the application of science to the human
condition—engineering in its best and broadest sense.
Indeed, we shall argue that the compact needs to drive
the creation of a new commons for coral reefs—a closely
managed commons that replaces today’s tragedy (Hardin
1968) and actively reshapes coral reefs for the Anthropo-
cene. We suggest that such a commons will restore our
science to a healthier place in society. Today, coral reef
science may seem to be part of a coral reef industry that
sometimes has more to do with ideology than science, and
that often places people in opposition to coral reefs. A
more relevant coral reef science could foster an optimistic
but realistic—an almost Victorian—awareness that coral
reefs can be shaped successfully for our beneficial use.
Globalisation is transmuting all ecosystems …
The Anthropocene is shaped by the existence of man. In just
a few tens of thousands years, this species has changed the
world’s fundamental biogeochemical cycles and climate
(Gruber and Galloway 2008). Man has also profoundly
shifted the global distribution of biomass and biodiversity.
We don’t yet know the details of the Anthropocene, nor how
it will play out over the long haul. Its future as a complex
system is both undetermined and unpredictable (Bradbury
2006), but we can now see its shape emerging clearly.
The great ecologist, Hutchinson (1965), saw the world
as an evolutionary play in an ecological theatre. Man has
Communicated by Editor-in-Chief Professor Rolf PM Bak.
R. H. Bradbury (&)
Resource Management in Asia-Pacific Program, College of Asia
and the Pacific, Australian National University, Canberra,
ACT 0200, Australia
e-mail: roger.bradbury@anu.edu.au
URL: http://rspas.anu.edu.au/blogs/rmap/
R. M. Seymour
CoMPLEX, University College London, Gower Street,
London WC1E 6BT, UK
e-mail: r.seymour@ucl.ac.uk
URL: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/CoMPLEX/
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Coral Reefs (2009) 28:831–837
DOI 10.1007/s00338-009-0540-6

trashed the theatre, a new one is rising, and a new play has
begun. The curtain has come down on the pristine world
and the play called the Garden of Eden. In its stead, there is
a new play called globalisation. The star of the show is
human population growth, with strong supporting roles for
economic growth, global warming, overfishing, deforesta-
tion, dam building, agriculture, fertiliser use and many
more (Steffen et al. 2007).
These actors interact in complex ways and at different
scales. For example, increasing gross domestic product
(GDP), through increasing energy use is reflected as
increasing temperatures at the global scale, and through
increasing agricultural production as increasing coastal
runoff of polluted rivers at the local scale. Increasing
human population is reflected as increased tourism pressure
on coral reefs at the local scale, and as the collapse of reef
fisheries at the regional scale.
The forces unleashed by globalisation are vast, are
accelerating and have great inertia. They are—in the short
to medium term—unstoppable and irreversible. They are
smashing up and reshaping all ecosystems on Earth,
including coral reefs, slowly suffocating regional and local
mitigation efforts. The ups and downs of financial cycles—
including, indeed, the current Global Financial Crisis—are
mere blips on this centuries old trend (Pandolfi et al. 2003).
Wilderness—by which we mean ecosystems unlinked
through man—has all but ceased to exist. The last rem-
nants—in the high seas—are being brought into the new
global system now. The land, where people live, is
becoming a new single, tightly interconnected, and greatly
simplified agro-ecosystem (Steffen et al. 2007) whose
contradictions in terms of energy and mass fluxes and
balances will be resolved in the sea, where people don’t
live. The sea is on a trajectory to becoming a vastly sim-
plified super-ecosystem whose closest historical analogue
will be the pre-Cambrian seas dominated by life forms such
as jelly animals and algae (Jackson et al. 2001; Pandolfi
et al. 2005). Coral reefs must find their future within this
world if they are not fated to be just road-kill on the
highway to the emerging Anthropocene, collateral damage
as the new Earth system takes shape.
… especially coral reefs
The forces shaping the Anthropocene have two critical
features. First, they are accelerating—global GDP is a good
simple proxy which shows a compounding growth rate of
ca 5% p.a. (Steffen et al. 2007; World Bank 2008) and so
an exponential doubling time of about 15 years. Second,
they have inertia—because of the time scales intrinsic to
both natural and human systems, there is no real prospect
of changing their trajectories in less than 20–50 years. For
coral reefs in particular, two forces stand out—overfishing
and CO2 emissions. Were each to act alone, they could
cause the collapse of the world’s coral reefs by 2050.
Together they have a good chance of doing it by 2025.
Consider CO2 emissions—the main driver of global
warming and ocean acidification. They are now above the
most pessimistic IPCC projections (Raupach et al. 2007) as
the world economy becomes more not less carbon intensive
(Canadell et al. 2007), and they are accelerating. We also
know that CO2 emissions have terrific inertia—there is at
least 0.6C already ‘in the pipeline’ (Hansen et al. 2005);
emitting infrastructure has a [20–50 year half life (Inter-
national Energy Agency 2008), and complex international
agreements (such as would be needed to change this
infrastructure) have rarely been made in \20–50 years.
This means that there is a high probability of[2C increase
in global temperatures by 2050 and a reasonable proba-
bility of [2C by 2025. As a result—regardless of any
feasible international action over the next 20 years—coral
reefs are almost certain to cross the temperature/pH
threshold for survival by 2050 and are likely to cross it by
2025 (Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2007).
Now consider overfishing. We know that global fishing
pressure is accelerating, probably ahead of global GDP
(Berkes et al. 2006; Scales et al. 2006; Worm et al. 2006;
Halpern et al. 2008; Jackson 2008). We also know that
global fish catch is declining (Pauly 2008). The terrible
math of exponential growth means that since the ICRS
symposium in Panama in 1996, when Jeremy Jackson
talked about the existential threat to coral reefs posed by
overfishing (Jackson 1997), fishing pressure on coral reefs
has essentially doubled. As with CO2 emissions, we also
know that overfishing has stunning inertia—coral reefs
have not yet equilibrated to the great removal of large fish
in the 1960s and 1970s (Hughes 1994; Myers and Worm
2003; Worm et al. 2005; Sibert et al. 2006; Myers et al.
2007); and the global fishing industry is overcapitalised
and subsidised by governments—a huge structural adjust-
ment issue which has successfully resisted change for the
last 40 years and is unlikely to change in the next 20 years
(Pauly et al. 2002). This means that on these locked-in
trends, overfishing, by itself, will almost certainly cause the
collapse of [95% of the world’s coral reefs by mid-cen-
tury, and is likely to do so by 2025.
But coral reef science has lost the plot …
Coral reef science has lost its way on the coral reef crisis
because it has lost its perspective on what the problem is. It
imagines the problem to be something to do with the
protection of reefs from outside influences—from ‘the
other’—and the solutions it offers mostly have to do with
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