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

Shannon G. Klein (), Cassandra Roch and Carlos M. Duarte ()
Additional contact information
Shannon G. Klein: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
Cassandra Roch: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
Carlos M. Duarte: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

Nature Communications, 2024, vol. 15, issue 1, 1-17

Abstract: Abstract Climate change impact syntheses, such as those by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, consistently assert that limiting global warming to 1.5 °C is unlikely to safeguard most of the world’s coral reefs. This prognosis is primarily based on a small subset of available models that apply similar ‘excess heat’ threshold methodologies. Our systematic review of 79 articles projecting coral reef responses to climate change revealed five main methods. ‘Excess heat’ models constituted one third (32%) of all studies but attracted a disproportionate share (68%) of citations in the field. Most methods relied on deterministic cause-and-effect rules rather than probabilistic relationships, impeding the field’s ability to estimate uncertainty. To synthesize the available projections, we aimed to identify models with comparable outputs. However, divergent choices in model outputs and scenarios limited the analysis to a fraction of available studies. We found substantial discrepancies in the projected impacts, indicating that the subset of articles serving as a basis for climate change syntheses may project more severe consequences than other studies and methodologies. Drawing on insights from other fields, we propose methods to incorporate uncertainty into deterministic modeling approaches and propose a multi-model ensemble approach to generating probabilistic projections for coral reef futures.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46255-2 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:15:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-024-46255-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-46255-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().