If nothing is done to slow down climate change and overfishing, a team of Australian scientists warn that the Earth’s coral reefs could be extinct within 100 years or less. At the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, coral reef ecologist Jennifer Smith produced the first global assessment of its kind about how overfishing of plant-eating fish impacts the reef ecosystem.

"I think this provides us with a really powerful tool to take to governments and management agencies around the world. Overfishing of these really important fish is happening at a global level, it’s kind of a wake-up call for people that are in a position of power to make decisions. So, hopefully it will be an important and powerful tool that we can use to bring to policymakers to elicit some sort of major change in the way that we view these important fish."