What Ridd conveniently ignores is that a lot of the increase in hard coral cover is due to a fast growing coral called Acropora. The problem being is that this genus of coral is susceptible to disease, bleaching, and especially storm damage as while it grows quickly, it is quite weak.
What this means is that while this is encouraging news, if a large scale disturbance, or a series of small scale disturbances hit the reef, then the coral cover will drop dramatically.
Hopefully the reef gets a window to recover its diversity and increasing its resilience.
