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This was a drop of good news about the world's oceans: The Belize Barrier Reef, the largest system of coral reefs in the northern hemisphere, has been removed from the list of world heritage sites in the world. ;UN.
The Unesco, the educational, scientific and cultural agency of the world organization, said its heritage committee had voted Tuesday to remove the reef from its list of threatened sites because it no longer faced an immediate danger of development.
"In the last two years, especially last year, the Belize government has made a real difference in transformational change," said Fanny Douvere, marine program coordinator at the UNESCO World Heritage Center.
United Nations officials first cited "the mangrove cutting and excessive development" as the main concern when the reef was added to the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2009. They also expressed their concerns concerning oil exploration. Since then, the Belize Government has imposed a moratorium on oil exploration around the reef and implemented protections for coastal mangrove forests.
Experts warned, however, that the long-term danger to the reefs of the climate change world remains real.
"The main threats are still there," said John Bruno, marine ecologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "The big, of course, is the warming of the ocean."
The largest coral ecosystem in the world, the Great Barrier Reef, has been hit hard by rising temperatures in recent years. A submarine heat wave in Australian waters two years ago has caused such a large decline in corals that scientists say the reefs will never look the same again.
Scientists say they have seen signs of coral bleaching on the Belize reef. Bleaching occurs when abnormally hot water causes corals to lose plant organisms that help them stay alive. In 2015 and 2016, nearly a quarter of corals off the Belize coast were affected by bleaching, according to a report from the Healthy Reefs Initiative for Healthy People, which monitors reefs .
If most of the world's coral reefs die, as scientists increasingly fear, some of the richest and most colorful life in the ocean could be lost, along with the income from reef tourism. In the poorest countries, lives are at stake: hundreds of millions of people derive their protein mainly from reef fish, and a reduction in this food supply could become a humanitarian crisis.
Australia has successfully demanded that a chapter detailing damage to the Great Barrier Reef Extract from a 2016 UNESCO report on threatened heritage sites so as not to affect tourism.
The Belize Barrier Reef system, which stretches for about 200 miles along the eastern coast of the Yucatan Peninsula, was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. The system includes a series of coral reefs, cays and islands. covered with mangroves.
Although they cover less than one thousandth of the bottom of the ocean, coral reefs shelter more than a quarter of the marine fish species. The state of the reefs is considered an important indicator of the overall health of the seas.
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