Over the past week, while the UN Ocean Conference unfolded in Nice, I’ve shared a daily series of photo essays from the opposite side of the world – Norfolk Island – where our tiny coral reef lagoon is showing all the warning signs of ecosystem decline.
This inshore reef, small enough to monitor closely and simple enough to track change clearly, has revealed a pattern: disease and algal overgrowth – all linked to poor water quality and long-standing land-based stressors. It’s a microcosm of what’s playing out on reefs around the world.
But today, for the final post, I want to show the other side of that story.
During the drought of 2024, anecdotally, corals began to recover. Disease rates dropped. Growth improved. Fish returned. These images are a glimpse of what Norfolk’s reef can still be – and could be more often – if we reduce the pressures coming from the land.
The warning signs are real. But so is the reef’s capacity to recover. What happens next is up to us.
Day 6 – A rare window into reef resilience
This week, I’ve shared some difficult stories from Norfolk Island’s reef – coral colonies lost to disease, one after another, each telling part of a bigger story of stress, decline, and silence. But today, for the final post in this series, I want to show you something else.
There are places in Emily and Slaughter Bays – particularly in the more sheltered corners and along certain ledges – where the corals are thriving. These aren’t just surviving colonies. Some are spectacular – with strong colour, good growth, and very little sign of disease. Much of this improvement coincided with the long dry period of 2024. Without the regular flow of fresh – and often polluted – water from the land, the reef was able to breathe again. Corals that had been struggling began to look visibly healthier. Disease dropped off. Growth picked up. Anecdotally, we saw more fish. We recorded more ‘new’ (to here) species for the first time. The reef felt different.
It was a glimpse – a window into what the lagoon could look like more often, if the pressures were reduced.
But here’s the catch. Nothing else changed. The water quality threats – excess nutrients, sewage, runoff – are all still there. So when the rains return, and the creeks flow again, we’re right back where we started.
As I said in my the second post of this six-day series, ‘Warning signs: coral disease takes hold’, in 2022, a team of researchers described Norfolk Island’s reef as among the most diseased in the world:
“In December 2020 and April 2021, we observed 60% of surveyed Montiporid coral colonies with signs of disease – a prevalence in line with the most severe coral disease outbreaks recorded to date worldwide.”
(Page et al., 2022)
That was a wake-up call. What we’ve seen since should be, too. But today’s images are here to remind us that recovery is possible. That this reef still has fight in it. That if we reduce the stressors – especially the flow of nutrients and contaminants from land – we can turn things around. We’ve seen it happen.
Now we need to act like it matters.
Above and below: Beautiful corals just metres from the shore on Norfolk Island’s reef
UN Ocean Conference 2025, blog blitz
Below is a list of the stories published this week, which together point to a reef under stress, a problem found all around the globe, but one that is within our capacity to fix:
Day 1: Warning signs: shifting baselines on Norfolk Island’s reef
Day 2: Warning signs: coral growth anomalies – the slow cancers of the reef
Day 4: Warning signs: what Norfolk Island’s reef is telling us
Day 5: Warning signs: quiet and unnoticed collapse of two coral colonies
Day 6: Glimpses of recovery: what the reef could be if we let it