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Wave goodbye to coral reefs: New science suggests Hawaii’s tourists are loving these vulnerable ocean ecosystems to death

I wrote this story for JOUR 4304: Science and Environmental Reporting at Carleton. The assignment was to craft a piece based on a peer-reviewed journal article.  

By Emma O'Toole

Hawaii’s visitors love coral reefs, but some scientists say that love may be doing more harm than good.

Until recently, environmental advocates have partially blamed tourism for Hawaii’s degrading coastlines without the science to back it up. A new study led by Princeton University amplifies these concerns, suggesting that live coral cover – the part of the reef covered by healthy, hard coral – is most damaged in the islands’ tourist hot spots.

“People often think there are these big, looming global stressors to coral reefs, such as climate change, that we can’t really do anything about, that subsume local-scale impacts. But we show that, no, these are important,” says Bing Lin, PhD student at Princeton University and co-author of the study.

“Large issues matter, but so do local ones, and they are detectable at a really large scale.”

To investigate the relationship between tourist activity and reef health, Lin and his fellow researchers superimposed data from Instagram posts geotagged on Hawaii’s coasts with maps of the area’s live coral cover.

The maps were created by Greg Asner, director of the Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science at Arizona State University and co-author of the study, using his advanced biodiversity mapping system. The technology operates from Asner’s airplane-based lab, transforming the molecular data of the seafloor 6,000 feet below into a colour-coded view of Hawaii’s reefs.

The results revealed the islands’ most frequented locations were home to its most damaged reefs. The research was published as a brief communication with the journal Nature Sustainability in January 2023.

Kirsten Oleson, professor of ecological economics at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, says the results are a good first step, but replicating the study would strengthen the science.

“It would be really interesting to see over time, as tourism numbers shift, if there is recovery or degradation in the reef,” Oleson says.

Still, she says this study emphasizes the need for environmental policy reform and can act as a push for legislators.

“It’s clear that we need to mitigate local stressors to give the corals a fighting chance at surviving climate change,” Oleson says.

According to Oleson, those stressors – such as overtourism and coastal pollution – combined with the effects of climate change make for a “cocktail of death for the reefs.” She says the next step is to educate tourists on the measures they can take to reduce their ecological footprint when visiting these vulnerable ecosystems.

A screengrab from a map of Kīholo Bay, a popular tourist attraction on the Island of Hawaii, created using Greg Asner's AToMS biodiversity technology. Red indicates healthy coral while blue indicates dead coral. [Centre for Global Discovery and Conservation Science, 2019]