Global warming threatens Lakshadweep’s coral reefs.

An 18-year-long study has found that the island’s corals are in dramatic decline.

For most of us, thinking about Lakshadweep islands conjures images of pristine beaches, clear blue seas and fascinating coral reefs that are home to a diversity of plant and animal life. This might not be far from reality but recent research questions how long will these serene islands remain the same.

A nearly two-decade-long study by the Oceans and Coasts Program of the Nature Conservation Foundation’s (NCF) has found that the absolute coral cover in these islands has reduced from 51.6% in 1998 to 11% in 2017, a staggering 40% decline.

They have found that the alarming rate of coral mortality and their shifting species compositions, combined with their slow rate of recovery, could severely limit their ability to resist future disturbances due to climate change.

The enormous drop in coral cover is a result of repeated and increasingly severe climate change-related disturbance. By monitoring the same reefs since 1998 through a series of El Niño disturbance events, the researchers have found that the way a single reef responds to and recovers from a stressor can change drastically through time.

The Lakshadweep islands are an archipelago of 36 atolls - ring-shaped reef, island, or a chain of islands formed of coral - in the eastern Indian Ocean, off the south-west coast of India.

They found that El Niño events, sudden increases in ocean temperatures that kill large tracts of coral, are occurring more regularly than ever before. Three mass bleaching’s of corals have been witnessed in the islands in the last 20 years, in 1998, 2010 and 2016 respectively.

The good news is that with every subsequent El Niño event, less coral is dying—the reefs are becoming more resistant. The bad news is that their ability to recover from each event has declined dramatically. The even worse news is that the frequency of these disturbance events is increasing all the time—killing the reef before it is able to limp back to health again.