World’s first swim across Red Sea to highlight effects of climate change on marine life ahead of COP27

Seeking to raise awareness of the effects of climate change and global warming on marine life and coral reefs, British-South African endurance swimmer and ocean advocate Lewis Pugh has started a journey swimming from Saudi Arabia to Egypt’s Hurghada, which will make him the world’s first person to swim across the Red Sea.

The 160-kilometer swim started on October 11 from Saudi Arabia and will last for about two weeks until reaching Egypt’s Hurghada, passing by the city of Sharm El-Sheikh, where the 27th session of the Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP27) will convene on November 6-18, the Lewis Pugh Foundation said.

It noted that scientists warn that if the plant’s temperature rises much more than 1.5°C, the world will lose 70% of the world's coral reefs, adding, “If we heat it by 2°C, 99% of coral reefs will die. We are currently on track for at least 2.2°C increase.”

“If we continued to overheat our plant, we are on course to lose 99 percent of the world coral reefs and so much more. No matter where you are on this planet. This will impact you. So, I urge all nations to drastically cut their emissions without any further delay,” Pugh said.

On the same day Pugh began his journey, researchers at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa revealed that half of the coral reefs in the world could become permanently vulnerable to “unsuitable conditions” in just more than a decade under a worst-case scenario.

According to the university, lead author Renee O. Setter, a doctoral student in the Department of Geography and Environment at the College of Social Sciences, said that the negative impacts of climate change on coral reefs “are actually worse than anticipated due to a broad combination of climate change-induced stressors.”

However, coral reefs in the northern Red Sea were reported to be “less sensitive” to bleaching [turning white as a sign of dying] than elsewhere, as they stand defiant against the impacts of climate change.

Eslam Osman, a lecturer of marine ecology in the Faculty of Science at Al-Azhar University, in cooperation with coral reef ecologists from Saudi Arabia, the UK, and Australia, published a study in 2017 in the scientific journal Global Change Biology, which revealed that the northern Red Sea has had no recordings of coral bleaching over the past three decades, indicating that “coral reefs in this area are less sensitive to high temperature,” Egypt Today reported.

One year later, the team conducted another study showing the reasons why coral reefs of the northern Red Sea are resistant against the high seawater temperatures. Osman told the newspaper that “newly discovered algae have not been recorded elsewhere, highlighting endemism in the region, and likely playing important roles for heat resistance in the northern Red Sea.”

“There is a mutualistic relation between the coral reefs and the algae living inside, as the algae provide the reefs with food and oxygen in exchange for their environmental protection,” Osman added.