Yerevan, Armenia – Nearly all of the world’s shallow-water coral reefs face an extremely high risk of collapse by 2075 due to climate change, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) warned Thursday.

In the first global assessment of its kind, the world authority on threatened wildlife classified 96% of the planet’s coral reef systems as “critically endangered” — its highest risk category.

Corals are heat sensitive and particularly vulnerable to human-driven climate change, which is warming the world’s oceans and increasing the frequency and intensity of damaging bleaching events.

“The future threat of climate change is looming and severe, and that poses a very high risk to the survival of these ecosystems,” said Mishal Gudka, scientific lead of the IUCN Red List of Coral Reef Ecosystems assessment.

The emergence this year of a super El Nino, the natural warming phenomenon, also presents a risk to corals, Gudka said at a news conference at the U.N.’s COP17 biodiversity summit in Yerevan,…