Coral reefs cover just one-percent of the earth and that one-percent is at risk.

Moku o lo'e, also known as coconut island, is where a kind of emergency response team is gathering..scientists, marine resource managers, non-profit representatives, policy makers and cultural practitioners.

Ku'ulei Rogers HIMB assistant researcher says,"The purpose of the workshop here is to look at all the different tools and develop a response plan to what's going to occur if a major bleaching event comes here to the islands."

Coral gets its nutrients and color from an algae, but when ocean temperatures rise, the corals start to lose that algae, basically bleaching the coral and leaving behind a white skeleton.

"As the severity and the frequency of these temperatures continue to increase and it multiplies upon each other then we're going to see more widespread bleaching throughout the islands."

Scientists say the last coral bleaching event in Hawai'i was in 2004 here in Papahanaumokuakea, the northwestern islands...and in 1998 here in the southern Hawaiian islands. The corals recovered as temperatures returned to normal...not so in the caribbean and Florida...and in the Western Pacific it's a crisis as they depend on the reef to catch their food.

Ben Namakin, from the Conservation Society of Pohnpei says, "I've met up with many elders in the village and I ask them about what they've seen in the change in the environment in their community and most of the response i get is that they're experiencing something that has never happened in the past."

"My aunty them remember when the beaches along Kane'ohe bay was white white sand at Kualoa."

Papahanaumokuakea Resource Manager, Kimo Carvalho says, "I wanted to bring to the table cultural practitioners and traditional practitioners to the table to develop or better develop how we're going to incorporate traditional knowledge into marine management ."

This workshop also looks at which corals are more resilient and why.
And the bigger picture, preventing the warming of sea temperatures, which scientists say is caused by the burning of fossil fuels.