Scientist issues warning over dying coral reefs

Subscribe

Leading marine biologist Thomas J. Goreau tells RIA Novosti how overfishing and waste dumping have brought the world's largest area of coral reefs to the brink of collapse, with devastating consequences to fish stocks and biodiversity.

Томас Горо, ученый-биолог

Question: Indonesia, Australia and Papua New Guinea jointly own over 5 million square kilometers of the so-called Coral Triangle, considered the most diverse marine environment in the world with over 75 percent of all known reef-building coral species and 3,000 out of 3,700 reef fishes in Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Surely such a vast, diverse and remote location is the least endangered?

 

Answer: Although the Coral Triangle contains the world's largest and richest area of coral reefs, still, around  95% of the coral reefs are so severely damaged as to have lost most of their ecosystem function, biodiversity, fisheries, shore protection, sand supply, and ecotourism potential.

Q: Is it really that bad?

A: Sport divers have a far better sense of the condition of the reefs in this part of the world than scientists do, because scientific study of these reefs has been far too little and far too late.

The late Larry Smith was the most experienced live-aboard boat dive master in Indonesia, with around 50,000 dives on remote reefs from one end of Indonesia to the other. Even in the 1990s almost everywhere he went the reefs were already destroyed. When he would find untouched reefs in perfect condition and note them as places to return to, he would almost inevitably find the following year that fishermen had bombed these reefs into rubble.

Q: What are the consequences of this degradation?

A: Seventy percent of the region's protein intake comes from fish, mostly dependent on healthy coral reefs. As the coral reefs are destroyed, so vanishes the fish habitat, fish stocks, fish catches, and the food supply for hundreds of millions of people. As the corals die so does the protection of low lying shorelines from flooding by tsunamis and storm waves, the potential for keeping up with global sea level rise, the new sand to maintain beaches, the hopes of ecotourism development, and the potential for new pharmaceuticals from the richest marine biodiversity on the planet.

Study of the reefs now amounts to finding the last disturbed remnants, since no part of the region is out of reach of fishermen's boats, bombs, and cyanide, or the escalating threats of global warming, new diseases, land-based sources of pollution, and sedimentation from deforested lands. These irreplaceable natural services can only be maintained if the damaged reefs are restored to health.

Q: Won't they restore themselves if left alone?

A: Natural recovery of damaged coral reefs occurs faster in the Coral Triangle than any place on earth, because the strong currents provide rich plankton food for corals and transport their larvae. Nevertheless, few of the damaged coral reefs of the Coral Triangle have recovered. Corals settle on loose dead coral rubble, only to die when they are turned over in the monsoon season waves. It is clear that active restoration is needed. Yet for the last decade the scientifically baseless and irresponsible claim that coral reefs are "resilient" ecosystems, able to bounce back all by themselves from any damage, largely promoted by the US and Australian governments, has been used to prevent funding for restoration.

After the Tsunami, the International Coral Reef Initiative and the World Bank Expert Group on Coral Reef Restoration announced that countries affected by the tsunami should do nothing at all. They should simply wait and the reefs will recover all by themselves. But in all the areas worst affected by the tsunami, the reefs had already been long dead, and had failed to recover.

The standard strategy has been to declare marine "protected" areas (MPAs). It is claimed that by preventing fishermen from fishing in these areas, the damaged coral will spring back by themselves (the so-called "resilience" hypothesis), will become packed with schools of fish, and these benefits will spread out to envelop surrounding areas. But if all of the 5% or so of reefs left in good condition are strictly protected, what will happen to the fishermen? Without prime quality habitat providing the shelter and food they need, the fish populations cannot possibly recover. Starving fishermen will have no choice but to invade the little good reef left if they want their children to eat.

That is why without restoration of the already damaged habitats, there will be no hope of maintaining the fisheries and other ecological services that only healthy and diverse coral reefs can provide. Conservation is necessary, but it is just not sufficient by itself to do the job needed, without large-scale investment in restoring the roughly 95% of reefs that are already degraded. What is really needed is not more study but large scale ACTION, training local students in the arts of ecosystem restoration, and funding them to work with communities to restore their vanishing marine habitat. Yet restoration has been almost totally ignored by policy makers and funding agencies.

Q: Are there any practical methods of restoration already available?

A: In the last few decades a completely new approach, the Biorock® method, has been developed, which uses safe low voltage electrical currents to grow natural limestone rock out of the sea on steel structures of any size or shape. This provides the same natural material that coral skeletons are made of, and on which baby corals prefer to settle. The Biorock process provides the only marine construction material that gets stronger with age, and are self-repairing, with damaged areas growing back preferentially. They can be designed to create denser and more varied hiding places for fishes than even a natural reef, and rapidly build up large and diverse fish populations. Corals  growing on them grow two to six times faster than normal, have sixteen to fifty times higher survival from severe high temperature stress caused by global warming, recover from physical damage, and spontaneously settle on them, many times faster than normal. As a result reefs can be kept alive where they would die, and reefs grown back in a few years in places where little or no natural recovery is taking place. These reefs have turned severely eroding beaches into growing beaches in a few years, which survived the tsunami that passed over the islands where they were located.

In a world where water quality is steadily deteriorating from out-of-control global warming and pollution, Biorock reefs survive stresses that kill all the corals on conventional artificial reefs. Not only do they provide benefits that conventional reef restoration methods cannot, they cost far less. In addition these methods can be used not only to grow new reefs on shallow banks, but also can be used to grow floating coral reefs in deep water, providing habitat for open ocean food chains such as tuna and squid. They are therefore the only practical interim solution to maintain reef ecosystem services until global climate change and pollution are reversed.

 

Q: But surely governments and big international NGOs would be willing to lend a hand?

A: Hundreds of Indonesian students have been trained in coral reef restoration over the last nine years at six Indonesian Biorock Reef Restoration Workshops, yet there remains no funding for them to use their knowledge and skills professionally.

Even though Indonesia has the world's largest coral reef restoration projects, it proved impossible to find any funding at all to restore coral reefs in the areas affected by the tsunami in Sumatra, despite intense efforts by our Sumatran students. Until policymakers and funding agencies place priority on training, developing, nurturing, and maintaining endogenous restoration skills, and then making sure those who have them can make a living from their knowledge, large-scale pro-active management of the Coral Triangle reefs will be impossible.

Turning fisherfolk from hunters into sustainable reef farmers will be essential to maintain fisheries and biodiversity in the future. The techniques to do so have been developed in Indonesia, but large-scale investment by governments and funding agencies is needed for training and application of new technologies within the context of community-based restoration and management programs.

 

Thomas Goreau, president of the Global Coral Reef Alliance, is also the coordinator of the UN Commission on Sustainable Development Partnership in New Technologies for Small Island Developing States. The commission will take part in the World Ocean Conference on May 11-14 in Manado, Indonesia. He can be contacted at goreau@bestweb.net.

Interview taken by Mikhail Tsyganov in Manado.

Newsfeed
0
To participate in the discussion
log in or register
loader
Chats
Заголовок открываемого материала