We should not lie to ourselves about the real situation just for feelgood purposes. It looks nice, but is empty. We are still missing thousands of species here

We should not lie to ourselves about the real situation just for feelgood purposes. It looks nice, but is empty. We are still missing thousands of species here that can't return until much later. If we have a oil palm monocultures, "technically" we have a forest. We have an area covered by trees, but this is not the same as having a mature rainforest, that play in a much upper level and a totally different league. Acropora dominated reefs are the equivalent to really young forests composed mostly with 2m trees. Yes, a poor reef is better than nothing, but we must understand that they sustain a much lower Shannon index than a mature reef and that we should keep protecting it for a long, long time.