The Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network (GCRMN) has released a new Science-to-Action Brief, Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2025 – Results and Implications for the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF), highlighting the critical role of long-term coral reef monitoring in supporting global biodiversity commitments.
The Brief draws on the Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2025 report and its findings to show how long-term coral reef monitoring can help countries assess biodiversity trends, strengthen national reporting and accelerate action under the KM-GBF.
Coral reefs are among the world’s most valuable natural assets, supporting biodiversity, food security, livelihoods, coastal protection, economies and cultural identity for close to one billion people. Yet these ecosystems face mounting pressure from climate change, increasingly frequent marine heatwaves and local stressors, including pollution. As disturbances become more frequent, the time available for reefs to recover is shrinking, placing their ecological health and the benefits they provide at risk.
Key Recommendations for Parties, observers, financial institutions and implementation partners:
- Translate monitoring data into action to address coral reef pressures. Coral reef monitoring should serve as a catalyst for management and policy action. Parties and partners should leverage GCRMN findings to directly inform, target, and scale up interventions that reduce key drivers of reef decline – including climate change, land and marine-based pollution, unsustainable fishing, and poorly managed coastal development – while embedding resilience-based management into local, national, and regional marine planning.
- Increase investment in coral reef monitoring, management and resilience building systems to strengthen the availability of long term ecological data needed to assess condition, inform evidence-based decision- making, support Goal A indicators, and improve national reporting, particularly in developing countries where monitoring gaps remain greatest.
- Expand spatial and temporal monitoring coverage to improve the representativeness of coral reef observations, strengthen long-term baselines, increase coverage of underrepresented regions and enable more robust assessment of ecosystem trends and progress towards KM-GBF goals and targets.
- Improve biodiversity data accessibility and interoperability to ensure coral reef observations can be effectively integrated into national biodiversity monitoring and action plans used to support KM-GBF reporting and indicator assessments, consistent with FAIR data principles.
- Expand the range of ecological indicators used for coral reef monitoring beyond hard coral cover, including complementary indicators aligned with Essential Ocean Variables, such as reef fish biomass, water quality, nutrient and sedimentation loads and wastewater exposure, to strengthen assessment of ecosystem condition, resilience, and change under the KM-GBF.
- Integrate ecological and socio-economic monitoring approaches to strengthen understanding of links between ecosystem condition and nature’s contributions to people (Target 11).
- Strengthen integration of coral reef conservation and monitoring into National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), ensuring that reef condition and resilience are reflected in national targets, implementation measures, finance strategies, and reporting frameworks.
The GCRMN’s Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2025 report provides the most comprehensive global assessment of coral reef status and trends to date. Covering changes in hard coral and macroalgal cover between 1980 and 2024, it brings together more than 21.1 million observations from 87,299 surveys across 36,886 sites. Contributions from 600 partners across more than 120 countries, territories and economies underpin this extensive global evidence base.
Learn more about the Science-to-Action Brief: Download here
Read the full report: https://gcrmn.net/2025-report/
