The seas of East Asia contain 30 percent of the world's coral reefs, including the most biologically diverse corals and reef ecosystems on the planet. Rapid economic development and booming population growth are the major threats here, driving an upswing in coastal construction and those ever-popular destructive fishing aids, dynamite and cyanide. The poison is used to capture stunned fish for the lucrative Asian restaurant trade in live fish; it also kills corals. Reefs throughout the Philippines and western Indonesia are on the brink of annihilation, and biologists estimate that most of the region's reefs will be severely depleted within the next 40 years.