Energy & Commodities mixed · 1–3 years
A what‑if from the future

What if a global bleaching event collapses the world's coral reefs?

Reef collapse hits fisheries/protein and reinsurance-backed coastal tourism, not row-crop grains — the wheat/corn mapping is a category error. The tradable read is regional reinsurance pricing and seafood/protein inflation in SE Asia/Pacific. Rhymes with the 2016 Great Barrier Reef mass-bleaching shock to Queensland tourism; effect is localized and chronic, so fade any implied global food-CPI move and price it through tourism-exposed names and CAT covers.

40%
our model probability
over 1–3 years
prediction markets — the market's odds
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Anchored to measured history 40% · 90% range 28–52% · 40 dated precedents behind it — a wider range means thinner evidence

Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.

The butterfly cascade

How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.

Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving

Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…

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What it would mean

If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A fourth global bleaching event kills most tropical reefs, gutting fisheries and reinsurance-backed coastal tourism economies. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Food inflation ▲ · Climate/crop supply ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.

Methodology. Probability and impact are anchored to history and scored against what actually happens — wins and losses, in public, at Reality Check. Market odds live from Polymarket & Kalshi. By Vikas Singh, Quantitative Strategist. Updated 2026-08-13.