From Reef Condition to Seascape Governance: A Multiscale Annual-Report Assessment of Coral Triangle Resilience, 2022–2024
Keywords:
Coral Triangle; annual reports; live coral cover; North Borneo; reef resilience; marine governance.Abstract
Coastal resilience assessments in the Coral Triangle frequently juxtapose protection commitments with ecological conditions without examining whether the underlying indicators refer to comparable spatial units. This study evaluates a nested annual-report dataset combining regional conservation reporting for six Coral Triangle countries with repeated coral-reef monitoring in Malaysia and site-level observations from Sabah, North Borneo. The analysis draws on the 2023 and 2024 Reef Check Malaysia survey reports and the Coral Triangle Initiative’s 2024 annual report; 2022 reef-cover estimates are retained as published baselines. Percentage-point changes, site-matched contrasts, survey-coverage diagnostics, habitat-specific indicator availability and descriptive protection-stratum comparisons were calculated without pooling non-equivalent country statistics. Malaysia’s reported mean live coral cover fell from 47.83% in 2022 to 45.87% in 2023 and 44.65% in 2024. In contrast, the North Borneo ecoregional mean rose from 38.13% to 39.56% between 2023 and 2024. Across 14 repeatedly reported Sabah localities, nine recorded higher cover and five lower cover; changes ranged from −10.53 to +9.95 percentage points. The 2024 regional report also documents unevenly specified marine conservation achievements across the six member countries, which cannot be interpreted as equivalent ecological outcomes. Results demonstrate that broad-scale decline can coexist with localized improvement and substantial within-region variation. A multiscale reporting framework is proposed that connects repeatable reef condition indicators with seagrass and mangrove monitoring, management effectiveness and explicitly documented subnational coverage.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Abdul Rouf, Munir Ahmad Khan Gasura, Isra Mawaddah (Author)
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