Toward Sustainable Marine Governance in the Egyptian Red Sea: A Multi-Decadal Integration of Climate-Driven and Anthropogenic Pressures on Coral Reef Resilience

Coral reef ecosystems of the Egyptian Red Sea face escalating pressure from compounding climate-driven warming and intensifying coastal development, dual stressors whose spatial expression and governance implications remained insufficiently characterized prior to the designation of the Great Fringing Reef Marine Protected Area under Prime Ministerial Decree No. 4419/2025. This study develops an integrated multi-decadal framework combining 32 years of sea surface temperature and surface current velocity records, two decades of satellite-derived chlorophyll-a observations, and four decades of satellite-derived coral reef extent mapping across five monitored coastal sites. Basin-wide SST warming of ≈1.15 °C is spatially heterogeneous, with the northern coastal sector warming nearly 25% above the southern sector rate. Surface circulation diverges structurally at Ras Banas: acceleration in the north is consistent with enhanced advective dilution of anthropogenic inputs, whereas consistent deceleration in the south (mean −0.03 m/s) is associated with an increased ecological footprint of wadi-derived sediment and nutrient discharge. Sharply localized chlorophyll-a anomalies, reaching 0.97 mg/m3 at Hurghada and spatially congruent with documented development chronologies, are consistent with anthropogenic disruption of oligotrophic water quality as an important contributor to reef degradation at northern sites. Field evidence from 2026 repeat surveys, interpreted alongside documented severe regional bleaching affecting southern Egyptian reefs during 2024, suggests that climate-driven thermal stress constitutes a parallel and active pressure, particularly in the southern sector where thermal and anthropogenic stressors appear to have converged during the period of most acute reef contraction. Landsat-derived losses of 24.1–50.2% across all monitored sites since 1985, including a 33.3% contraction at Halaib–Shalateen between 2022 and 2025 alone, reflect the cumulative outcome of these interacting pressures. These findings support the ecological necessity of the 2025 MPA while identifying spatially differentiated, dual-stressor governance priorities essential to translating its policy commitment into measurable conservation outcomes.