British-South American Swimmer Lewis Pugh goes for first swim across Red Sea from Saudi Arabia to Egypt- photo from his Foundation Facebook page
CAIRO – 14 October 2022: To tug the world leaders and decision-makers’ attention towards climate change impacts on the coral reefs, British-South African endurance swimmer and ocean advocate Lewis Pugh has began, on October 11, a swimming journey across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia to Egypt.
“Precious coral reefs are being destroyed by warming oceans. I’m urging world leaders to take daring climate motion at #COP27,” he took to Twitter, adding that his journey would start on Saturday.
🚨 ANNOUNCEMENT 🚨
Tomorrow, I’ll begin the primary swim across the Red Sea, to deliver a message.
Precious coral reefs are being destroyed by warming oceans. I’m urging world leaders to take daring climate motion at #COP27 🪸🌍🌡 #CoralSwim @UN @UNEP @LGIM pic.twitter.com/fX8fv8xEMw
— Lewis Pugh (@LewisPugh) October 10, 2022
“If we continued to overheat our plant, we’re on track to lose 99 percent of the world coral reefs and so far more. Regardless of where you’re on this planet. This can impact you. So, I urge all nations to drastically cut their emissions with none further delay,” he said in a message on his Twitter account.
The 160-kilometer swimming journey began from Saudi Arabia to finish in Hurghada, passing by the town of Sharm El Sheikh where world leaders, decision makers, climate change experts, and environmentalists gather to debate easy methods to take concrete actions to implement their guarantees towards cutting their emissions shares. It will take two weeks of swim, in response to Pugh’s website.
As per a report by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in August 2018, 75 percent of coral reefs on Earth experienced stress induced bleaching over the period between 2014 and 2017, adding that about 30 percent of the reefs reached the mortality level.
As announced by the United Nations data on climate change, 30 percent of carbon dioxide produced by humans is absorbed by oceans, which endangers the marine live. Nonetheless, some marine creatures of the northern Red Sea stand defiant against the increasing temperatures of oceans and seas.
Unlike every kind of coral reefs all around the world, coral reefs within the northern Red Sea stand defiant against ocean warming even when the ocean water temperature increases by 6 °C in the summertime, Lecturer of Marine Ecology within the Faculty of Science at Al-Azhar University Eslam Osman told Egypt Today in March 2019.
“No coral bleaching was recorded within the northern Red Sea over the past three many years and that indicates that coral reefs on this area are less sensitive to hot temperature,” said Osman, who conducted a study published in 2017 by Global Change Biology on Coral bleaching refugia of the northern Red Sea, in cooperation with coral reef ecologists from Saudi Arabia, the UK, and Australia
A recent study conducted by researchers from Al Azhar University, Cairo and University of Essex, UK, discovered five unique sorts of algae that might help the coral reefs within the northern Red Sea to be resilient to climate change and avoid the strategy of bleaching.
Additional reporting by Samar Samir
