Red Sea reefs offer last stand for corals

MARSA ALAM, Egypt — Beneath the waters off Egypt's Red Sea coast, a kaleidoscopic ecosystem teems with life that could become the world's "last coral refuge" as global heating eradicates reefs elsewhere, researchers say.

Most shallow water corals, battered and bleached white by repeated marine heat waves, are "unlikely to last the century", the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said this year.

That threatens a devastating loss for the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who depend on the fish stocks that live and breed in these fragile ecosystems.