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Systematic review of the uncertainty of coral reef futures under climate change, datasets

Klein, Shannon1; Roch, Cassandra1; Duarte, Carlos1

Published Feb 27, 2024 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4f4qrfjkp

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Feb 27, 2024 version files 121.05 KB

Abstract

Climate change impact syntheses, such as those by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), consistently assert that limiting global warming to 1.5°C is unlikely to safeguard most of the world’s coral reefs. This prognosis primarily stems from 'excess heat’ threshold models, which assume that widespread coral bleaching predictably occurs when temperatures accumulate beyond a specific threshold. Our systematic review of research projecting coral reef futures to climate change (n=79) revealed that 'excess heat' models constituted only one third (32%) of all studies but attracted a high proportion (68%) of citations in the field. We observed that most methods employed deterministic cause-and-effect rules rather than probabilistic relationships, impeding the field's ability to estimate uncertainties of coral reef futures. In attempting to assess the consistency of projected impacts, we aimed to identify common coral reef metrics under the same emissions scenarios. However, disparate choices in metrics and emissions scenarios hindered a cohesive synthesis and limited the exploratory analysis to a small fraction of available studies. We found substantial discrepancies in expected impacts to coral reefs, suggesting that some 'excess heat' models may project more extreme impacts than other methods. Drawing on lessons from the field of climate change science, we propose that an IPCC ensemble-like approach to generating probabilistic projections for coral reef futures is feasible. Successful implementation will require improved coordination among modeling efforts to select common output metrics and emission scenarios, addressing existing geographical biases, among other gaps in current modeling efforts.