Scientists Identify Swaths of Coral Reefs That Might Be Able to Withstand Climate Change, Offering New Avenues for Conservation

New research has mapped more than 64,000 square miles where the crucial habitat seems to be somewhat protected from the impacts of the warming ocean

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

June 22, 2026 2:01 p.m.

a coral reef — A coral reef in the southern Andaman Sea, in Southeast Asia Cavan Images / Henn Photography via Getty Images

It’s hard to feel optimistic for coral reefs, given the constant headlines about mass bleaching events and deadly disease. Now, a new study offers a glimmer of hope: Coral reefs in some places might be more resilient to climate change than previously thought.

Researchers identified more than 64,000 square miles of coral reefs across 71 countries and 100 territories with the potential to survive warming oceans, offering additional avenues for reef conservation. The findings were presented on June 16 at the Our Ocean Conference in Mombasa, Kenya, and are available on the pre-print server EcoEvoRxiv. They are undergoing peer review for publication.

“Coral reefs are often framed as ecosystems beyond saving,” said study co-author Emily Darling, director of coral conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society, at the conference, per Anand Ram at Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News. “This research shows otherwise.”

Need to know: What are coral reefs?

Corals are made of tiny individual animals called polyps. Hard corals make rigid skeletons of calcium carbonate to protect their soft interiors. Collections of these hard corals are considered coral reefs.

Coral reefs are one of the most valuable ecosystems on our planet. Even though they span just 1 percent of the seafloor, they’re estimated to support a quarter of marine life. However, they’re also one of the most vulnerable ecosystems. They’re threatened not just by pollution and overfishing but also by rising ocean temperatures, which make bleaching events more frequent.

Bleaching occurs when water that is too warm causes a coral to expel the algae that live in its tissues, removing its main food source and causing it to turn white. While bleached coral is still alive in the short term, it is stressed and can die if conditions persist.

Previous research has found three types of climate-change safe havens, or refugia, for corals. Some areas have certain protections against physical characteristics of climate stressors, such as heat, called avoidance refugia. It’s currently the most identified type of refugia for corals. But there are also resistance refugia, where corals are better able to tolerate heat stress, and recovery refugia, where reefs can quickly bounce back after exposure to heat.

So, Darling and her colleagues taught artificial intelligence to pinpoint these refugia by training it on about 45,000 coral reef observations collected since 1960. It relied on 42 predictors, including ocean temperature, chemistry and human pressures, to estimate coral cover and community composition in 2020 and predict cover in 2050.

Feeding two coral reef habitat maps into the A.I. model revealed coral regions that display characteristics of climate resilience. About 61 percent of the area is in the coastal waters of five countries: Australia, the Bahamas, Cuba, Indonesia and the Philippines.

What’s more, the researchers identified potentially significant refugia in Belize, Nicaragua and the Turks and Caicos Islands, adding to the areas found in the 50 Reefs assessment, whose results were published in 2018. It was the first overview of coral reefs that could withstand climate change.

“This [new] study sharpens decades of work on reef resilience to climate change,” says David Obura, a marine ecologist and chair of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity Ecosystem Services who was not involved in the new research, to Katharine Houreld at the New York Times. “It focuses attention on the critical question: Will climate refuges comprise 10 percent, 1 percent or even less of the former extent of coral reefs?”

The results from the Turks and Caicos are intriguing because there is a lack of long-term data on corals there, says Alizee Zimmermann, executive director of the Turks and Caicos Reef Fund, who was not involved in the research, to Teresa Tomassoni at Inside Climate News. She would like to see how the surveys used in the study were conducted.

Zimmerman also notes that nuance is important. “The narrative that Caribbean reefs are simply ‘dead’ is inaccurate and can be harmful to progress on reef restoration and protection initiatives in the region,” she tells the outlet. “However, it would be equally disingenuous to say that they are thriving.”

Overall, the authors of the new study want their work to offer a roadmap for where countries should invest conservation funding, especially for small nations with limited resources.

“Climate-resilient reefs are not spread evenly,” said study co-author Joseph Maina, an environmental scientist at Macquarie University in Australia, at the conference, reports CBC News. “And countries need to understand … those differences such that when they plan where future conservation investment should go, they consider this uneven distribution.”

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