This year, we got good news about them: there are three times more coral reefs tough enough to survive a high-emissions climate crisis scenario for 2050 than a landmark 2018 effort found. Scientists from Macquarie University in Sydney and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York looked at 165,922 km² worth of ocean floor across 71 countries, and found that reefs are more climate-resilient than we thought.

The territory covered in the study includes reefs in seven British, six Dutch, and 13 French overseas territories. You may not expect it, but over 20% of the world’s warm-water coral reefs are European, all located in the EU’s overseas territories and outermost regions. An estimated 33% of EU overseas entities’ waters have protected status – see the map below.

So why are these reefs more resilient than we thought? Not all reefs respond to climate change in the same way, explains Stacy Jupiter, co-author of the paper and executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Global Marine Program. Some sit in natural cool pockets that shelter them from extreme heat, some simply resist bleaching and stress better, and others bounce back faster after damage.

That resilience doesn’t erase the damage already done. We’ve already lost over half of all coral reefs since the 1950s due to the climate crisis and other human activity. Between 2023 and 2025, the most severe global coral bleaching event ever was recorded, with 84% of global coral reefs affected due to heat stress.

Yet fewer than 28% of these newly identified climate-resilient reefs are located within protected or conserved areas, according to the study. Climate change remains the greatest long-term threat to coral reefs, with water pollution and fishing pressure being among the leading local threats to almost two-thirds of coral reefs worldwide.

“Coral reefs are often framed as ecosystems beyond saving,” Emily Darling, co-author and director of coral conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Society, told Reuters. “This research shows otherwise: we know where the hope is, and what we need now is political will.”

Protecting the newly found resilient reefs will also take funding: in EU overseas territories, that funding comes partly through the BEST Initiative. They recently funded 81 biodiversity projects across regions, including a clean-up effort in Réunion Island where divers are hauling decades of dumped metal waste off of eight reef sites.

But funding alone won’t save a reef. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which directs these funds, stresses that protection on paper isn’t the same as protection in practice. “Coral reef resilience requires effective governance, locally led action, and sustained commitment to protecting the natural systems that support both biodiversity and human well-being,” Cristina Romero, programme manager at IUCN, told us.