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Professor Duarte highlighted the need for international collaboration as key, as no single nation has the capacity to reverse the threat to coral reefs alone.
Professor Duarte said: "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is committed to the conservation of coral reefs in the Red Sea and keen to share the lessons that it has learned with the rest of the world but we can't do that alone.
"We need a global partnership to accelerate our speedy progress to conserve coral reefs and ensure that our children and grandchildren will continue to enjoy healthy reefs in the Red Sea and elsewhere.
“Red Sea coral reefs are the best preserved in the world and remarkably beautiful.”
Professor Duarte added that by the turn of the century, about half of the coral reefs were lost.
“We should not accept the loss of the coral reefs and grieve, but there is a need to act and strengthen cooperation to preserve them, not only through green recovery plan but blue recovery initiatives as well.”
"So the ambition of the Saudi G20 presidency is to not only seek to conserve the reefs we have but to actually increase the extent of coral reefs globally by maybe 10 percent," he asserted.
