Lavanya Ramanathan: So tell us about your work and how coral reefs fit in.

Benji Jones: I’m interested in how the world is changing and how ecosystems are changing. And those changes are caused by all kinds of things, like, deforestation, construction for the suburbs, and they’re also caused by climate change. And when you look at the impact climate change is having on the planet, there’s obviously the human component — how sea level rise is affecting coastal communities, how heat waves affect people in cities without tree cover, especially lower-income communities. 

And then there’s what warming is doing to all kinds of ecosystems. The ecosystem that is perhaps the most impacted of all by climate change is coral reefs. That’s because when the ocean heats up, it causes the relationship that coral has with a kind of symbiotic algae to break down, and in that process, the coral “bleaches” and can starve to death.

In the last three decades, we’ve seen marine heat waves that are just devastating across the planet, really, and especially in the Caribbean. When I think about the ways climate change is affecting the environment, I think about coral reefs and that makes me really sad, because they’re these incredible, vibrant ecosystems. 

Coral reefs are also really essential to human life: They defend coastal communities from storm surge during hurricanes. They’re nurseries for all sorts of commercial fish that people like to eat — things like grouper and lobster. And they’re major engines for tourism for a lot of islands and coastal regions around the world. 

Benji diving in the waters around Bonaire. 
Jenny Adler for Vox

You found a place that gives us a reason to believe not all hope is lost for coral reefs. How did you find Bonaire?

Last year, I reported on what’s going on with the reef in the Florida Keys; 90 percent of the coral has died off in the Keys. 

Organizations are trying to restore the reef by literally raising baby corals in a nursery and then planting them out on a reef, like you would plant saplings in a forest to restore a forest. 

So in fall 2023, I went diving down in the keys to check in on this work after a marine heat wave, and discovered that all this coral that was planted over the course of years — we’re talking thousands of pieces — almost all of it had bleached or was already dead. So all of this conservation work just felt … totally futile.

A school of blue tang fish swim in the waters around Bonaire. 
Jenny Adler for Vox

It raised this question for me, is there anything we can do, short of putting an end to climate change, short of putting an end to emissions, to help reefs hold on? 

That’s how I came across Bonaire. I asked scientists to show me an example of how local actions, like putting a park around a coral reef have made it less likely to die and more resilient in the face of climate change. 

Bonaire is just this really quirky island, it’s very small. It’s just east of Curacao and just north of Venezuela, so super far south in the Caribbean. One thing I love about it is that on the surface, it’s like a desert — it’s super arid, there are cactuses everywhere, there are wild donkeys just wandering the streets, there are these salt flats that have flamingos.

And it’s surrounded by a coral reef that is considered by many people, for most of modern history, to be the healthiest in the Caribbean. 

Tell us about the conservation efforts in Bonaire. And, there’s something else going on, too, beyond human efforts, right?

I would hesitate to call it healthy, but Bonaire hasn’t collapsed in the same way that coral reefs all over the Caribbean have. 

You have a reef with tons of coral, these giant colonies of animals called polyps that have built these incredible structures that are multicolored and come in different shapes. Something is going on in this reef. 

From what experts have told me, there are a few things, actually: One of them is that Bonaire is so far south that it falls below the common path that hurricanes take. A lot of the destruction has been caused by major hurricanes that knock coral over or make the water so cloudy that the reefs can’t get enough sunlight.

Coral infected with stony coral tissue loss disease, seen in the white-ish part on the bottom right.
Jenny Adler for Vox

The other big piece is the conservation that’s been happening in Bonaire for so long. There’s a conservation group called STINAPA that is responsible for managing a marine park that surrounds the island, and manages a land-based national park. It’s funded by a tax that tourists pay every time they enter one of those parks. 

With that revenue, it’s able to restrict fishing and ensure that there’s no anchoring, and that companies building hotels on the coast are not doing damage to the coral reef. These conservation activities have been in place since the ’70s, which is really unheard of in the Caribbean. It seems that restricting fishing has really benefited the coral reef in Bonaire, and made it more resilient. 

What can other communities take away from Bonaire?

There is a way that governments, that conservationists, can help their reefs hold on. We see that in Bonaire. We see that decades of protection has helped the reef become more resilient. If  you have strong marine protections, and marine parks that are well-enforced, you can give coral reefs a fighting chance. 

There’s a big “but” in all of this: Just drawing a boundary around a chunk of ocean isn’t enough to stop the most extreme impacts from climate change and disease. One of the most depressing parts of my trip was seeing a disease called stony coral tissue loss disease wreaking havoc on this reef. 

That’s really frustrating — it’s not clear where this disease comes from and it’s hard to stop. What protection can do is make sure that the reef is in the best shape as possible before that disease hits, so there’s more coral to start with.  

But this was the scariest takeaway from my reporting: If this healthiest reef can’t survive, what hope do other reefs have? That’s a question I feel compelled to leave readers with. That should be a wake-up call for people.

More money, fewer problems: A program that guarantees New Orleans high school students $50 a week is expanding after seeing successful results in a one year study that found that recipients had more financial stability, missed fewer days of school, and showed more literacy growth than their peers. The experiment was the first of its kind to study the effects of universal basic income on young people. [Nola]

Trial and error: Rapper Young Thug’s racketeering trial has resumed in Atlanta after an eight-week pause. This time, there’s a new judge in town — the third one presiding over the trial so far. The twists and turns are sure to continue in this case that’s already the longest in Georgia history. [The New York Times]

Getty Images Entertainment

As the Democratic National Convention kicks off in Chicago, one pressing issue on the minds of voters is Israel’s war in Gaza. The Biden administration’s policy on the subject — and VP and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ stance on it —  will surely be a topic of discussion at the event and in the weeks till  the election. Policy correspondent Abdallah Fayyad recommends reading this Washington Post article on activists who are pledging to make their presence known at the DNC. 

“Though Harris has an opportunity to distance herself from Biden — who alienated many Arab American voters because of his full-throttled support for Israel in its war on Gaza — she hasn’t yet articulated if or how her own administration would handle the war differently,” he said. “That’s left many Palestinian Americans and their allies wary of supporting her presidential campaign, and those frustrations with Harris will likely be on display in Chicago this week.”

Pro-Palestinian protesters organized by Coalition to March on the DNC rallied in Chicago in May.
Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

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Today’s edition was produced and edited by senior editor Lavanya Ramanathan, with contributions from staff editor Melinda Fakuade. We'll see you tomorrow!

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