GEO-6 Regional Asssement for West Asia


The shallow water habitats within the Red Sea and western Arabian Sea are generally less threatened, as are the deeper water habitats in all eco-regions (Figure 2.4.2).


Figure 2.4.2: Ecosystem threat in the Arabian Peninsula


a whole are dwindling in size and becoming fragmented. Nearly 40 per cent of the mangrove area along the coasts of the ROPME Sea Area has been lost during the past few decades. Losses in wetland areas was noted to vary between 0.01 per cent and 29 per cent, with the highest loss recorded in Jordan and the lowest in the UAE, both of which are considered the highest in terms of vulnerability (CBD 2015).


Lebanon


Syrian Arab Republic


Iraq


Gaza Strip


West Bank


Jordan Kuwait BahrainQatar


Economic losses due to biodiversity degradation vary from one country to another in the region. The cost of degradation is associated either with coastal development, land conversion and mining or with low investment in habitat conservation. For instance, for Bahrain, with the highest relative risk in terms of wetland loss, annual welfare losses were estimated at USD865 000 in 2015 (CBD 2015).


Saudi Arabia


United Arab Emirates


Coral reefs Oman Yemen


Terrestrial Ecoregions Status Critical or endangered Vulnerable


Source: Olson et al. 2001 Source: World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 2009 Mangrove ecosystems


Black mangrove occurs in the ROPME Sea Area, and it seems likely that the red mangrove may have grown there in historical times (Tengberg 2002). The latter still grows naturally along the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia in 104 locations with an estimated total area of 3 452 hectares (NCWCD/ PERGSGA 2015). The environmental benefits of these systems include provision of habitat for many species of fishes, birds and invertebrates, as well as naturally storing carbon over millennia. While habitat restoration initiatives have led to an increase in the mangrove areas in the southern Gulf, mangrove ecosystems along the coasts of Arabia as


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Coral communities in the inner ROPME Sea Area are low diversity assemblages dominated by relatively stress- tolerant species. These corals have been shown to house a unique species of coral-associated symbiotic algae that confers superior thermal tolerance, prevalent in the Gulf but unknown outside the Arabian region (Hume et al. 2015; D’Angelo et al. 2015). As a result of this unique coral-algal association, corals from the Gulf tend to experience lower levels of bleaching and mortality at elevated temperatures than corals from other regions (Hume et al. 2013), with bleaching thresholds several degrees above that normally observed in the tropics (Riegl et al. 2011).


The north-eastern Arabian Peninsula contains several unique biogeographic provinces for coral. Although tending to be more resilient than in other regions, the thresholds have been reached for certain coral reefs in north-eastern Arabia, which have undergone considerable decline in recent decades as a result of both global climate impacts and local pressures. Unusually warm sea temperatures associated with an El Niño event in 1996–1998 resulted in the loss of more than 90 per cent of corals from many parts of the ROPME Sea Area through coral bleaching . Weaker but recurrent bleaching events were also observed in the Gulf in 2002,


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