LONDON: The International Union for Conservation of Nature has named an Emirati woman as its new president at its World Conservation Congress in Marseille.
IUCN is a union that brings together some of the world’s most influential organizations and experts to conserve nature and accelerate the transition to sustainable development.
“Regional representation and scientific expertise are core to IUCN,” Enrique Lahmann, IUCN global director said. “The union’s democratic process, bringing together over 1,400 state, indigenous peoples’ organizations, and civil society members, gives incoming President Razan Al-Mubarak and the council she leads a strong mandate.”
Al-Mubarak is the founding managing director of the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund, which under her leadership has supported more than 2,000 species conservation projects in more thsn 160 countries.
She is also the head of the Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi (EAD) and the managing director at Emirates Nature, an NGO affiliated with the World Wildlife Fund.
Members elect the chairs of IUCN’s commissions, which bring together 18,000 volunteer experts from around the world in a range of disciplines from species conservation to environmental law and protected area management.
The commissions assess the state of the world’s natural resources and provide the union with expert knowledge and policy advice on conservation issues.
International conservation organization elects Emirati woman as president
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International conservation organization elects Emirati woman as president
- IUCN is a union that brings together some of the world’s most influential organizations, experts to conserve nature
- Al-Mubarak is the founding director of the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
