Managing coral reefs for resilience to climate change.

<p>A. The conventional view of resilience. Natural communities are highly resilient to climate change, i.e., the tipping point (black circle) leading to an alternative ecosystem state is far to the right and attained only at high levels of climate disturbance. As chronic anthropogenic disturbances gradually degrade the original ecosystem (open block arrows), the tipping point in response to climate change gradually shifts to the left (black arrows), making the ecosystem less resilient to climate disturbance. Management that seeks to control local anthropogenic disturbances should reverse degradation (red block arrows), shifting the tipping point back to the right, towards higher resilience (red arrows). B. A possible counter-intuitive effect of managing coral reefs for resilience to climate change. If the effect of chronic anthropogenic disturbances, which gradually degrade the original ecosystem (open block arrows), is to remove disturbance-sensitive individuals and/or species, the tipping point in response to climate change will gradually shift to the right (black arrows), making the ecosystem more resilient to climate disturbance. Management that seeks to control local anthropogenic disturbances and reverse degradation (red block arrows) will inadvertently shift the tipping point back to the left, towards lower resilience (red arrows) to climate disturbance.