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Experiments in the simulator have shown that structures like this with coral on them more effectively reduce wave energy, in some cases reducing it by up to 95 percent, according to Landolf Rhode- Barbarigos, a researcher at the University of Miami.

Before the end of the year, Rhode-Barbarigos and other scientists will sink a few different structures, including seahives, in North Miami Beach. They’ll plant coral on some of them to test them in real-world conditions for the first time.

The University of Miami’s restoration project is considered a “hybrid” approach because it involves a human-made structure and live corals. But dozens of initiatives around the world — and many in Florida — involve planting coral straight on dying or damaged reefs, as I reported in April. A key selling point for these projects is that they can help safeguard coastal communities against storms.

Liv Williamson, a doctoral researcher at the University of Miami, picks up a baby coral. These tiny coral colonies are part of an experiment on disease.

Researchers at the University of Miami and elsewhere have also been developing coral colonies that grow quickly and better tolerate rising ocean temperatures, disease, and predation, often with some out-there approaches. The idea is to regrow reefs with corals that can tolerate the forces that wiped them out.

If coral reefs are so valuable, why don’t we pay more for them?

The US spends roughly $500 million a year to limit coastal flooding and related threats, according to USGS. In some years, those numbers are much higher: The Army Corps of Engineers spent $15 billion in 2018, for example, on projects to prevent flood and storm damage.

These figures make what cities spend to restore ecosystems look like pennies. The nation’s largest project to restore reefs, an initiative in the Florida Keys called Mission: Iconic Reefs, has received only around $5 million in federal funding.

“Funds for disaster management and climate adaptation are tens to hundreds of times larger than funds for habitat conservation and restoration,” authors of the Nature study wrote.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Damaged homes and streets seen after Hurricane Irma passed through Big Pine Key, Florida, on September 13, 2017.

That’s starting to change as government agencies look to reefs as a defense against tropical storms. One example is the seahive project, which was initially funded by the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (which is in turn funded by the federal government).

The Department of Defense is also shelling out millions of dollars for coral restoration through DARPA’s “Reefense” initiative. This is a big deal because it opens up an enormous new pot of money for reef conservation and restoration, said Andrew Baker, a coral researcher at the University of Miami who’s helping make corals more resistant to extreme heat.

Ultimately, protecting and restoring coral reefs is about much more than protecting coastal cities. Though they cover less than 1 percent of the world’s oceans, reefs sustain about one-quarter of all marine life and half of all federally managed fisheries. It’s hard to think of a better example of how helping an ecosystem is also helping ourselves.

The Russian ruble to USD exchange rate over the past six months.

Those are policies the Russian central bank engineered, but Russia has also benefited from the fact that it is still exporting a lot of oil and gas, including to places like Europe, which gets more than one-third of its natural gas imports from Russia. That money — hundreds of millions per day from the European Union alone — is coming into the Kremlin’s coffers, and their ability to replenish funds gives the economy a cushion.

This is partly why Putin started demanding “unfriendly countries” pay for natural gas in rubles, as it would help prop up Russia’s currency. But it’s also why, until his shutoff to Poland and Bulgaria (who are far from the biggest consumers of Russian gas), Putin wasn’t enforcing it because it might require contract renegotiations, and that might incentivize EU countries to start the process of weaning themselves off Russian hydrocarbons altogether.

Neither sophisticated Russian central bankers nor energy can fully save the Russian economy in the long run. As Smith said, this is the economic crisis playbook. “The problem with that playbook, of course, is that it runs a course,” Smith said.

These measures are painful, which makes them harder to sustain. Russia has slightly eased some of its interventions, inching down interest rates to a (still high) 14 percent. It also loosened some capital controls, but that also knocked the value of the ruble.

Oil and gas revenues help, but if sanctions tighten or Russia is forced to sell its gas on the cheap — or if the threat of running afoul of sanctions deters even the bargain hunters — the safety net frays over time. Russia has already said oil output is expected to decline as sanctions hinder investments and trade.

“There was an initial shock,” Feygin said. “It’s over, but it’s not better.”

The toll of Russian sanctions, so far

Russia wants everyone to want rubles. But there isn’t much Russia can do with all those rubles because sanctions block those transactions or make them way too expensive. “The money itself matters, but also how you can use it — both in terms of who your counterparts are, and physically, how you can move it around — matters much more,” said Edoardo Saravalle, a sanctions researcher.

Moscow can’t buy some foreign goods because of controls on critical items like microchips. Those restrictions will directly undermine Russia’s technology and defense sectors, making it difficult to continue developing weaponry or tools like artificial intelligence, or even repair damaged tanks.

Even if items are not explicitly banned, the web of financial sanctions can make it difficult to do transactions, and often it’s easier for Western companies to self-sanction to avoid running afoul of any possible penalties.

And sanctions have revealed how reliant Russia is on imported goods and products, not just for the things the country’s populace buys, but for the things it needs for the products it makes and sells at home.

All of that means Russia’s economy will become more isolated over time. Data from other countries has shown that it is already beginning to happen, as imports to Russia are crashing. For example, Finland’s exports to Russia are down 60 percent; South Korea’s are down about 62 percent.

Russian planes are now mostly limited to domestic flights because of sanctions, but because a lot of the jets in Russia are made by Western companies like Boeing, Russia can’t get spare parts or maintenance, leaving it to recycle parts from grounded planes or cut back the flights it still has. Car companies can’t get parts, either.

Companies can’t get bleaching reagents for paper or packaging for baby food. One report from a Russian business outlet said that 90 percent of Russian bread makers rely on parts from Europe; their current replacements will only last months. Russia’s garment industry got a lot of buttons from the European Union. As Elvira Nabiullina, the governor of Russia’s central bank, said, finding new buttons is possible, it just takes time.

All of this cascades across the economy. If a car company can’t get parts, it may have to temporarily shutter and its employees will lose income. If the bakers can’t fix their mixers, it may mean bread shortages. If Russia can’t get semiconductors or chips for computers or communications systems, it will have to make equipment that is less technologically and economically efficient. A report from the Bank of Russia called what Russia is facing “reverse industrialization.”

The US and its allies also keep adding more sanctions. So far, they are not as sweeping as what happened in the early days of the war, but instead are more incremental, building on what was already in place. For example, after the discoveries of the Bucha massacre, the US closed a loophole on Russia’s sovereign debt payment that might now force Russia to default on its foreign debt for the first time in more than a century. Europe is reportedly ready to move on a gradual oil embargo. It’s a cumulative tightening that gives Russia fewer and fewer options out of the catastrophe.

Ordinary Russians, too, have fewer options. They are the ones who will feel the real crush of sanctions. Overall, experts said, Russians are likely worse off than they were two months ago. “People are seeing a squeeze on their real incomes, that’s the main effect that ordinary Russians are feeling,” said Jacob Nell, former chief Russia economist and head of European economics at Morgan Stanley.

Ziemba said, at the outset, relatively well-off Muscovites might have felt the shock of sanctions most sharply — like those who worked in tech or who had a nice chunk of change in a foreign bank account. This is partly what prompted tens of thousands of people to flee, a “brain drain” depleting Russia of those who might be best able to help Russia recover, whenever that might be. Still, the sanctions have now made it even harder for those people to leave. There are few planes to take you anywhere, and Russians can’t take out more than $10,000 in foreign money from their accounts, making it hard to start a new life, wherever you might go.

Yet many of those middle- and upper-class Russians — with resources at the start of this crisis — are the people best able to withstand sustained sanctions pressure in the longer term. Russia’s most vulnerable will feel the sanctions’ pain most acutely, watching their incomes shrink, struggling to pay for goods, and seeing services fall away.

As Shagina said, those on Russia’s periphery were always an afterthought, and they will be the ones who suffer the most. “If you look at the people who were sent to fight the war in Ukraine, and they’re from the Far East. And because they were poor, I think their situation will be even worse,” she said. That is, the Russians who have the least power may be punished the most.

So are Russian sanctions working? Well, it depends on the goal.

The longer sanctions stay in place, the worse it will be. “We’re ultimately looking at an economy that is shrinking, is turning more inward,” Ziemba said.

Russia may figure out how to navigate as a permanently state-sanctioned economy — like an Iran or a North Korea. “These economies, they don’t just stop, they kind of slow down and stumble,” Saravalle said. “But often, I think in the popular perception, there was this point where the economy just collapses — and there isn’t necessarily. Past sanctions programs haven’t had these types of collapses.”

Russia will find workarounds where it can. It will substitute for supply chains, many of which will be murky, and help fuel a dark economy. Living standards may erode to levels not seen in decades, and the things Russians buy may be more poorly made and harder to get. “Cuba refurbishes old cars for a reason,” Feygin said. In early April, after the Biden administration tightened sanctions, a senior Biden administration official told reporters that, at this rate, Russia “will go back to Soviet-style standards from the 1980s.”

That will not likely happen in the immediate future, but it is the course Russia is on, for as long as the West keeps it there. But the question is: What does the West actually want to achieve by doing this? Before the invasion, the Biden administration framed the threat of sanctions as a way to deter Russia from invading Ukraine. It did not.

In the wake of the invasion, the goal was framed as “inflicting pain on Russia and supporting the people of Ukraine,” which is how Biden put it in his State of the Union. He also talked about depleting Russia’s military, making it harder to wage war in the future.

The Biden administration has also indicated that certain sanctions are trying to squeeze Russia, eroding its ability to finance its war in Ukraine. This month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said that the US “wants to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.” The administration hopes to accomplish that through a combination of sanctions on Russia and aid for Ukraine.

But it’s less clear what a “weakened” Russia means, and what the United States and allies would do with it. Are they using the pressure to get Russia to the negotiating table? Are they trying to stop the war by getting Russia to withdraw or surrender? Or to defeat it? And what are the consequences of that?

If this is an indefinite effort to weaken Russia, it may get harder to keep up the intensity. The US and its allies acted in cohesion and got enormous buy-in from other partners, including in Asia. But as the war drags on and sanctions continue, that coalition may fracture, especially if the economic costs mount beyond Russia’s borders.

Poorer countries will experience the shock of these economic sanctions, without having much say at all in whether or not they will support these policies. Farmers in Brazil need fertilizer from Russia, countries that depend on Russian arms exports all of a sudden won’t have parts or equipment for themselves, either.

As experts said, the United States and its allies may also need to mitigate the pain for these countries, promising to help replace arms at a discount or offer food aid. The US’s latest request to Congress for $33 billion in supplemental aid to Ukraine partially acknowledged this, including funding for global food assistance.

The sanctions on Russia are unraveling its economy. But this act of extreme economic pressure will have consequences beyond Russia. “It’s a form of economic war,” Saravalle said. “But it’s also very much like we’re reshaping the global economy.”

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