This is scientific American 60 second science. I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

Coral reefs are already appreciated for their beauty, but they provide another more tangible benefit too.

Every day waves are coming ashore and of course during storms you might have 20 foot waves.

The reef is breaking those waves, essentially dissipating that energy before they hit the shoreline.

Mike Beck, a marine scientist for the Nature Conservancy and UC Santa Cruz.

If we're to lose just a little bit of our reef, I mean, we model just losing the top-most meter of reef.

Storm costs would double.

Beck and his team used 30 years of wind and wave data combined with hydrodynamic, ecological, and economic

models to figure out what future floods would look like with shorter reefs.

And you repeat that all around the world for all 72,000 kilometers of coral reef coastline.

Overall, they found that the flood protection benefits of coral reefs save the global economy

$4 billion a a year and the biggest

beneficiaries are Indonesia the Philippines Malaysia Mexico and Cuba. The full

list is in the journal Nature Communications.

National economies only account for what you take from ecosystems.

That is, what you harvest every year gets included in your GDP, not the benefit of keeping it there.

By pinning a number on the flood protection benefits of coral reefs, Beck says he hopes

government economists will see corals as more than just a draw for snorkelers.

Thanks for listening.

For Scientific American 60 Second Science, I'm Christopher and Deliata.