PARIS, France (AFP) — A super El Nino fuelling record ocean temperatures poses a “terrifying” threat to the world’s fragile coral reefs, the chair of the UN’s expert nature panel told AFP.

Marine scientist David Obura said the exceptional El Nino pattern building strength in the tropical Pacific could drive vulnerable coral species even closer toward extinction.

Corals are heat sensitive and particularly vulnerable to climate change, which is heating the world’s oceans and increasing the frequency and intensity of damaging bleaching events.

But this year’s El Nino layers “a terrifying level of additional risk”, said Obura, a Kenyan reef expert and chair of IPBES, the UN’s expert scientific panel on biodiversity.

The warming phase of a natural climate cycle, El Nino events temporarily elevate global temperatures, altering cloud and wind patterns, and raise the risk of damaging weather.

Global forecasters expect this episode to be the strongest on record, and sea surface temperatures in parts of the Pacific have already hit all-time highs months before its expected peak.

That greatly concerns Obura, who recalled the damaging impact of a previous super El Nino episode in 1997/98.

“That this coming event is worse than that, after three intervening global bleaching events …

is a terrifying reality,” he said.

Obura led a major reassessment of coral health published in Nature on Thursday that reported a sharp deterioration in reef-building species since the last global census in 2008.

“Our results show that by 2020, nearly half of coral species were at elevated relative risk of extinction” with climate change the main driver of this decline, wrote Obura and dozens of top scientists.

The review covered hundreds of species on the IUCN’s “red list” — icons like staghorn and table corals whose mineral skeletons give reefs their dazzling three-dimensional complexity.

This “indicates conditions for corals are worsening significantly…

not at all surprising given the accelerated warming and lack of abatement of global drivers of coral decline”, said Obura.

But the study was completed in 2020 and the findings today would be even bleaker, Obura said.