12 Leaders The EconomistOctober 26th 2019
2 prevent the spread of news from this “enemy” service by means
of jamming and internet censorship, at least some of Xinjiang’s
10m Uighurs still manage to receive it. In 2018 a survey by rfaof
Uighurs who had recently moved to Turkey found about a fifth
had been regular consumers of its news when they were living in
Xinjiang.
The benefits of such spending may also be reaped closer to
home. Many consumers of Chinese-language news from rfa
and stations like it, such as the bbcWorld Service, are Chinese
people living in the West. They badly need independent news in
their own language as China’s propagandists buy up the rest of
the world’s commercial Chinese-language outlets.
A bill in Congress would double the American government’sannual allocation for rfa’s Uighur-language service, from $2m
to $4m. That seems a worthy—and cheap—investment. rfa’s to-
tal annual budget of $44m, which also provides broadcasts in
eight other languages including Tibetan, is small change com-
pared with the country’s overseas aid of around $20bn.
There is little the West can do to persuade China to dismantle
the camps in Xinjiang. Western governments have remonstrat-
ed, to no avail. America this month imposed sanctions on Chi-
nese officials and businesses implicated in the mass intern-
ments, but the gesture was little more than symbolic. The
Communist Party may be embarrassed, but it will not be badly
hurt. The West may not be able to determine the fate of places
such as Xinjiang, but it can at least help tell their stories. 7C
orals arecomeback creatures. As the world froze and melt-
ed and sea levels rose and fell over 30,000 years, Australia’s
Great Barrier Reef, which is roughly the size of Italy, died and re-
vived five times. But now, thanks to human activity, corals face
the most complex concoction of conditions they have yet had to
deal with. Even these hardy invertebrates may struggle to come
through their latest challenge without a bit of help.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, a rise in global temperatures of 1.5°C relative to pre-in-
dustrial times could cause coral reefs to decline by 70-90%. The
planet is about 1°C hotter than in the 19th century and its seas are
becoming warmer, stormier and more acidic. This is already af-
fecting relations between corals and the single-celled algae with
which they live symbiotically, and which give them their colour.
When waters become unusually warm, corals eject the algae,
leaving reefs a ghostly white. This “bleaching” is
happening five times as often as it did in the
1970s. The most recent such event, between 2014
and 2017, affected about three-quarters of the
world’s reefs. Meanwhile the changing chemis-
try of the oceans lowers the abundance of car-
bonate ions, making it harder for corals to form
their skeletons.
If corals go, divers and marine biologists are
not the only people who will miss them. Reefs take up a fraction
of a percent of the sea floor, but support a quarter of the planet’s
fish biodiversity. The fish that reefs shelter are especially valu-
able to their poorest human neighbours, many of whom depend
on them as a source of protein. Roughly an eighth of the world’s
population lives within 100km of a reef. Corals also protect
150,000km of shoreline in more than 100 countries and territo-
ries from the ocean’s buffeting, as well as generating billions of
dollars in tourism revenue. In the Coral Triangle, an area of water
stretching across South-East Asia and into the Pacific which is
home to three-quarters of known coral species, more than 130m
people rely on reefs for food and for their livelihoods in fishing
and tourism.
Measures to mitigate climate change are needed regardless of
coral, but even if the world’s great powers were to put their
shoulder to the problem, global warming would not be broughtto a swift halt. Coral systems must adapt if they are to survive,
and governments in countries with reefs can help them do so.
Corals need protection from local sources of harm. Their eco-
systems suffer from coastal run-off, whether sewage or waste
from farms, as well as the sediment dumped from beach-front
building sites. Plastic and other debris block sunlight and spread
hostile bacteria. Chunks of reef are blown up by blast fishing; al-
gae grow too much whenever fishing is too intensive. Govern-
ments need to impose tighter rules on these industries, such as
tougher local building codes, and to put more effort into enforc-
ing rules against overfishing.
Setting up marine protected areas could help reefs. Locals
who fear for their livelihoods could be given work as rangers
with the job of looking after the reserves. Levies on visitors to
marine parks, similar to those imposed in parts of the Caribbean,
could help pay for such schemes. So too could a
special tax on coastal property developers.
Many reefs that have been damaged could
benefit from restoration. Coral’s biodiversity of-
fers hope, because the same coral will grow dif-
ferently under different conditions. Corals of
the western Pacific near Indonesia, for example,
can withstand higher temperatures than the
same species in the eastern Pacific near Hawaii.
Identifying the hardiest types and encouraging them to grow in
new spots is a way forward, though an expensive one. A massive
project of this sort is under way in Saudi Arabia as part of a tou-
rism drive. Scientists working alongside the Red Sea Develop-
ment Company want to discover why the area’s species seem to
thrive in its particularly warm waters.
More drastic intervention to head off the larger threats corals
face should also attract more research. Shading reefs using a po-
lymer film as a sunscreen to cool them is under discussion for
parts of the Great Barrier Reef. Other schemes to help corals in-
volve genetic engineering, selective breeding and brightening
the clouds in the sky above an area of the reef by spraying specks
of salt into the lowest ones, so that they deflect more of the sun’s
energy. These measures may sound extreme, but people need to
get used to thinking big. Dealing with the problems caused by cli-
mate change will call for some radical ideas. 7No longer in the pink
The world is going to have to start thinking radically to save its coral reefsCoral reefs