Coral reefs, considered the canaries of the worlds oceans, are being cooked. As many as 50 percent of reefs worldwide have been lost over the last few decades, with major die-offs in recent years due to mass bleaching events brought on by warmer ocean temperatures.

As the planet heads toward potentially catastrophic climate change, scientists have come to a sobering realization: Coral reefs, sensitive ecosystems that provide habitat for more than 25 percent of marine species and are vital to coastal communities around the globe, may not persist without radical human intervention .

On Wednesday a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a 200-page interim report that identifies more than two dozen intervention strategies, many of them experimental, that could make corals more resilient to the effects of climate change.

Coral scientists have reached an unheard-of state of urgency, recognizing that the status quo likely wont be enough to stabilize reef ecosystems in a warming world, Stephen Palumbi, the committees chair and a marine biology professor at Stanford University, said at a briefing on Wednesday. This sense of urgency was on full display at the committees first meeting in February, where Mark Eakin, the coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Coral Reef Watch, said the situation facing corals is dire.

The new report the first of two that the 12-person committee is tasked with producing provides an in-depth look at 23 techniques scientists could use to give corals a fighting chance, from relocation and genetic manipulation of coral species to antibiotic use and spraying salt water into the atmosphere to shade and cool reefs.

This is the first time anyone has looked into what abilities we might have to stabilize any major world ecosystem, Palumbi told HuffPost. In much the same way that the agricultural sector is planning for changing climate conditions, the committee set out to identify the range of resilience tools available to the field of coral science, he said.

The good news is there are many.

Not all of them are usable. Not all of them will work. Not all of them are actually feasible at the scale we want, Palumbi said at the briefing. But the fact that the coral reef community is pulling together to produce this list right now is, in fact, I think, the take-home message. The toolbox is not empty.