Working To Save The Florida Reef Before It's Too Late

BISCAYNE NATIONAL PARK, Florida — For more than 50 years the Florida Reef has been in serious decline into a state of morbidity that, unlike a similar malady that befell the iconic “river of grass,” has not elicited a flush of state and federal funding to revive it.

Fully half of the of coral reefs off the Florida Keys have declined since 1775 due to human impacts, according to a new multi-year government and private report on the health of nature nationwide.

Overall, the 350-mile-long reef — officially known as the Florida Reef Tract — that stretches from Biscayne National Park to Dry Tortugas National Park has lost at least 98 percent of its once-vibrant coral cover, scientists say. Left behind is grayish-white skeleton greatly diminished in sea life.

It’s not a recent development, but one that has been in motion for decades due to pollution, climate change, overfishing, and physical damage, the National Parks Traveler’s reporting over six months found.

The reef’s steep decline since the 1970s has come even though Florida has built a vigorous economy around it, one generating billions of dollars a year in value leveraged by tourism and commercial fisheries.

The reef’s value doesn’t stop there.

“Each meter of reef is estimated to protect $47,000 in property values by mitigating the effects of coastal erosion and storms,” notes the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. “It has further been estimated that the cost of destroying 1 kilometerof coral reef ranges from $137,000 to over $1 million over a 25-year period when taking into account the benefits derived from fisheries, shoreline protection and tourism.”

Possibly being lost are cures to medical mysteries. Since the 1300s, substances found in coral reefs have been used to treat ailments as diverse as cardiovascular diseases and skin cancers, according to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection.

And yet, while tens of billions of dollars have been spent on the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP) to restore the Everglades “river of grass” just inland, the reef has not enjoyed such robust public financial support.

The millions of dollars estimated to being spent each year on efforts to restore the reef “is just a drop in the proverbial bucket,” says Joanna Walczak, who led the coral program for Florida’s state environmental department before moving to the Loggerhead Marinelife Center, where she’s vice president of conservation. “It certainly warrants more funding.”

The National Parks Conservation Association’s Marisa Carrozzo added: 

“While there has been encouraging growth in investment and attention to reef health in recent years, the pace of action must accelerate to address the compounding threats from coral bleaching, disease, marine debris, pollution, and additional pressures.” 

“We can look to the winning Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan as a model, where robust and sustained funding has helped accelerate projects and deliver measurable benefits we can see,” added Carrozzo who serves as NPCA’s senior coastal and wildlife program manager in the Sun Coast Region.

“Similarly, coral reef restoration and protection require substantial, long-term investment from both state and federal partners to respond to and better prepare for the mounting threats across Florida’s reef tract.”

At some point, perhaps when the reef waters are too far gone to recover, the reef’s economic importance may gain attention that makes a difference.

Too Little Too Late?

The state of Florida has been investing in reef restoration, though not on the scale of the joint state-federal investment in CERP’s Everglades recovery efforts from Lake Okeechobee in the center of Florida down to Florida Bay.

The Florida Legislature approved $9.5 million on reef restoration projects for the current fiscal year, and in late May agreed to spend another $8 million for that in the coming fiscal year that opens July 1.

Since 2017, the state has “administered” more than $90 million on the Coral Protection and Restoration Program that funds water quality sampling, pollution reduction, coral disease research, coral nurseries, and other restoration efforts.

That pales against the more than $23 billion spent by the state and federal governments on the CERP since it was launched in 2000.

“If we get our acts together, (for) the cost for one Miami skyscraper, for the new railway that goes to Orlando, we could do the new reef wall,” said Charlie Gregory, a College of the Florida Keys professor of veterinary medicine involved with the reef restoration work.

With coral nurseries, Gregory said, “we're being genetically responsible so that we (out-plant corals) that can bring us into the future, against disease, against temperature, against acidification, against pollution.”

Whether the National Park Service or the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary are closely involved with this work is hard to say, as federal officials refused to allow their scientists to be interviewed for this series.

Marine heat waves in recent years, particularly 2023, have left many corals bleached white. One "grove" of elkhorn corals (last photo) was left degraded by the hot water/NPS and USGS photos.