British-South African Swimmer Lewis Pugh goes for first swim across Red Sea from Saudi Arabia to Egypt

CAIRO – 14 October 2022: To drag the world leaders and decision-makers’ attention towards climate change impacts on the coral reefs, British-South African endurance swimmer and ocean advocate Lewis Pugh has started, on October 11, a swimming journey across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia to Egypt.

“Precious coral reefs are being destroyed by warming oceans. I am urging world leaders to take bold climate action at #COP27,” he took to Twitter, adding that his journey would start on Saturday.

🚨 ANNOUNCEMENT 🚨

Tomorrow, I will begin the first swim across the Red Sea, to deliver a message.

Precious coral reefs are being destroyed by warming oceans. I am urging world leaders to take bold climate action at #COP27 🪸🌍🌡 #CoralSwim @UN @UNEP @LGIM pic.twitter.com/fX8fv8xEMw

— Lewis Pugh (@LewisPugh) October 10, 2022

“If we continued to overheat our plant, we are on course to lose 99 percent of the world coral reefs and so much more. No matter where you are on this planet. This will impact you. So, I urge all nations to drastically cut their emissions without any further delay,” he said in a message on his Twitter account.

The 160-kilometer swimming journey started from Saudi Arabia to end in Hurghada, passing by the city of Sharm El Sheikh where world leaders, decision makers, climate change experts, and environmentalists gather to discuss how to take concrete actions to implement their promises towards cutting their emissions shares. It would take two weeks of swim, according to Pugh’s website.

As per a report by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in August 2018, 75 percent of coral reefs on Earth experienced stress induced bleaching over the period between 2014 and 2017, adding that about 30 percent of the reefs reached the mortality level.

As announced by the United Nations data on climate change, 30 percent of carbon dioxide produced by humans is absorbed by oceans, which endangers the marine live. However, some marine creatures of the northern Red Sea stand defiant against the increasing temperatures of oceans and seas.

Unlike all kinds of coral reefs all over the world, coral reefs in the northern Red Sea stand defiant against ocean warming even if the sea water temperature increases by 6 °C in the summer, Lecturer of Marine Ecology in the Faculty of Science at Al-Azhar University Eslam Osman told Egypt Today in March 2019.

“No coral bleaching was recorded in the northern Red Sea over the past three decades and that indicates that coral reefs in this area are less sensitive to high temperature,” said Osman, who conducted a study published in 2017 by Global Change Biology on Coral bleaching refugia of the northern Red Sea, in cooperation with coral reef ecologists from Saudi Arabia, the UK, and Australia

A new study conducted by researchers from Al Azhar University, Cairo and University of Essex, UK, discovered five unique kinds of algae that could help the coral reefs in the northern Red Sea to be resilient to climate change and avoid the process of bleaching.

Additional reporting by Samar Samir