Coral reef ecosystems are increasingly under threat due to climate change, warming oceans, and anthropogenic influences, such as sedimentation and eutrophication. Another emerging and potentially major concern of future climate change is the acidification of the oceans and its influence on coral calcification. A reduction in reef building would be critical for coastal protection of low-lying coastal regions of the world in light of future sea level rise. The adaptive capacity of corals to synergistic multiple stressors is highly uncertain but will be better understood and projected if the historical context of change is more transparent. There is therefore an urgent need to improve understanding of causal relationships between historical changes in climate and environmental modification and how it influences adaptation and persistence of coral reefs at site-specific physicochemical environments and on a regional scale. This forum invites contributions on paleoclimatological, paleoecological and paleoenvironmental studies that properly assess and clarify the impact of climate change and multiple anthropogenic stressors, above all the spatio-temporal variability of temperature changes and river-, soil- and nutrient- discharge into tropical marine environments world-wide. We address 1) the ‘proxy’ community dealing with geochemical and growth parameters studies on historical time scales and 2) the Reef-Monitoring community. Numerous coral proxy records on sea surface temperature, salinity, ph and river discharge have been developed for particular reef systems. These proxy data need to be linked with research on ecological consequences of environmental changes derived from long-term reef monitoring programmes. This forum aims to bring the two communities together and stimulate cross-disciplinary research.