"The ocean needs a big victory"

That’s the moving words that Ocean on Fire - a new short film from Coral Gardeners - leaves you with. It sends chills down your spine. The work that needs to be done underwater to save the world from climate change is more than confronting.

Ocean on Fire is a short but incredibly impactful short film directed by award-winning filmmaker Sandra Winther and starring Coral Gardeners’ founder, Titouan Bernicot and Bailey Bass (Avatar: The Way of Water). Produced by the uniquely-talented Earthrise Studio, it centres around a conversation about how the world’s oceans are “on fire”.

It’s an ecological crisis on an unprecedented scale, happening below the waterline all over the world. Coral bleaching events are putting oceans in jeopardy. That’s why Coral Gardeners are literally working day-and-night to build more resilient reefs. All in a bid to save what we have left – and to restore this vital link in the ecological chain for future generations.

Rising sea temperatures aren’t just putting our coral reefs in danger: they’re killing them in mass bleaching events. As the ocean’s temperature rises due to human-made climate change, coral dies off in huge swathes. The once vibrant colours that illuminate the ocean floor, swaying with the symphony of the tides, are replaced by graveyards. Miles and miles of ghostly-white, calcified husks where the effervescent vibrancy once was. A permanent monument to humankind’s failure to protect it.

2023 saw mass coral bleaching events reported in over 60 countries and territories worldwide - including in our backyard, where the Great Barrier Reef continues to fall victim. Coral Gardeners told RUSSH that 2024 brought with it one of the largest global mass-coral bleaching events in history. We’re set to see more heartbreaking numbers in the coming years. And as a result, we’re falling into a catastrophically cascading feedback loop.

The faster the ocean warms due to climate change, the faster the coral will bleach. The faster the coral bleaches, the faster we lose the vital ecosystem beneath the waves. The faster we lose the coral, the faster climate change comes for us all.

We talk about how important it is to plant a tree to capture carbon, but few look offshore to the water, which holds beneath its ice-blue waves the most efficient and effective carbon capture and reduction facility known to man.

Thanks to a delicate balance of coral, phytoplankton, currents and even the salty water itself, our oceans are able to sequester - or capture and retain - up to 25% of human-generated emissions annually. It’s easy to say, but the scale is immense: it’s 38,000 gigatons of carbon. Put another way? It’s the CO2 that almost 1.5 trillion cars would put out in a year.

The ocean actually does more to sequester carbon emissions than even the world’s forests, which capture around 10-15 percent of emissions each year. Both are vitally important, but we’re losing the fight for the forests beneath the waves.

It’s for this reason that Coral Gardeners seek to get the word out. Both chilling and haunting, Ocean on Fire is a reminder of how much we have to lose. Watch the five-minute film here, or head to the Coral Gardeners website to find out more about how you can support its work.