South Asia is one of only two world regions where coral cover has recovered over the past two decades, according to the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network’s Status of Coral Reefs of the World: 2025 report — but the subregion containing Sri Lanka’s own reefs went the other way.
Hard coral cover across South Asia rose 16.2% between the 1997–2009 and 2020–2024 periods, taking average cover from 30.1% to 35%, NewsFirst reported. The only other region showing significant recovery was the Western Indian Ocean.
The regional headline is not Sri Lanka’s result
The recovery is not evenly spread. The report attributes the strongest gains to the Maldives and the Chagos Archipelago, oceanic atolls that rebounded substantially after the 1998 global bleaching event. The Maldives alone accounts for almost 59% of South Asia’s total reef extent, so its performance dominates the regional average.
Reefs in the West and South Indian Shelf subregion — which includes Sri Lanka and parts of India — recorded a decline in hard coral cover over the same assessment period. The report suggests continental shelf reefs may be more exposed than oceanic atolls to the combined pressure of climate change and local human activity.
For a Sri Lankan reader, that inverts the headline: the region improved, this country’s reef system did not.
The South Asia grouping also covers India, Lakshadweep, Bangladesh and Myanmar.
What is driving the losses
The report lists repeated marine heatwaves, bleaching, coastal development, pollution, wastewater discharge, destructive fishing and algal blooms as the main threats to South Asian reefs. It also warns that the fourth global bleaching event, which intensified through 2023 and 2024, has already hit parts of the region, with significant declines documented in the Maldives afterwards.
The global picture is much worse
Globally, hard coral cover is 9.5% below historical levels, and fell 8.9% between 2023 and 2024 alone — the largest single-year drop on record. Average global cover was down to 25.8% in 2024. The Caribbean has lost 43.4% and the ROPME Sea Area 48.7%.
The central finding is about timing. Reefs can recover, but they are no longer being given the chance to.
“If we give them enough time, they have the capacity to recover,” lead author Manuel Gonzalez Rivero told Reuters, in copy carried by Hiru News. “But we haven’t seen that amount of time being allowed. In fact, the frequency of those bleaching events has pretty much doubled.”
The gap between mass bleaching events once stretched decades; it now averages five or six years. Four global events have been recorded since 1998, three of them since 2010. The 2023 event was the most extensive ever, affecting 77% of the world’s reef area — part of what Gonzalez Rivero called a “staircase of decline”.
The recovery capacity is real when conditions allow it: over 2017–2019 reefs regained 6% cover, nearly offsetting the 6.6% lost to the 2016 bleaching.
The report draws on more than 21 million observations from over 87,000 surveys at nearly 37,000 reef sites, across 120 countries and territories, spanning more than 40 years of data.
Another event may be coming this year
With El Niño intensifying and ocean surface temperatures hitting a record 21.1°C on August 22, Gonzalez Rivero said another bleaching event could strike this year. “It is very likely given the temperatures.”
Sri Lanka’s Met Department has separately put the odds of the current event becoming “very strong” by year-end at more than 90%.
“We must act now to halt this decline and invest in solutions that reduce pressures and build resilience,” said David Obura, chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. “Delayed action risks locking in irreversible losses.”
The report was released as Pacific leaders gathered in Palau for the annual Pacific Islands Forum, ahead of the COP31 climate conference later this year.
Local context
Sri Lanka’s reef monitoring has been expanding. The Department of Wildlife Conservation completed a baseline survey of the Kayankerni and Pasikuda reefs in August, and a coral museum and research centre is opening at Nilaveli, where 245 coral species have been recorded.
Neither outlet published a country-level figure for Sri Lanka, gave the size of the West and South Indian Shelf decline, or reported any response from Sri Lankan marine authorities.
