Rewilding could help vulnerable islands keep pace with rising seas

Coral-fringed tropical atolls are among the landforms most threatened by global warming, but many have a potential superpower: Healthy ecosystems may help them keep pace with rising seas.

Atoll islands with native vegetation and thriving seabird populations are “naturally active systems that can change and adapt to their environmental conditions if they are allowed to do so,” said Nick Graham, a marine ecologist at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, who led an international team of scientists that studied island resilience across 28 atoll islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans.

Their paper, published Wednesday in Science Advances, shows that restoring atoll ecosystems reinforces their growth. Seabirds ferry nutrients from the open ocean and deposit them on the atolls as guano that nurtures land plants, marine life and coral growth. This provides more material for reef building, as parrotfish and other reef feeders turn dead coral into sand to maintain beaches, while native plants with extensive root networks stabilize sediments.