Coral Restoration In Trouble: Why Saving Reefs Takes More Planting Coral

0:00 Coral reefs are bleaching again this year. This is the fourth year in a row where the Great Barrier Reef has bleached a significant amount. Will it recover? Probably for the most part it will recover as it's recovered over the last four years. However, what is this going to do at time after time after time to the longevity of the coral reefs in the Great Barrier Reef, as well as around the world? And does restoration, coral restoration, help reestablish corals, not only locally, but will it help overall in the fight to protect corals? We're going to talk about that on today's episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. Let's start the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another exciting episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast.

0:42 I'm your host, Andrew Lewin, and this is the podcast where you find out what's happening with the ocean, how you can speak up for the ocean and what you can do to live for a better ocean by taking action. I'm going to tell you something here. I'm going to admit something. This is a bit controversial. When I saw this article, I was a little worried about bringing it up. It was in that cosmos and they tend to have pretty good articles. And I was worried because coral restoration is very popular right now. And this is something that a lot of people are doing, especially locally, to try and do something to reestablish the local coral population and protect it from not only bleaching, but other significant factors such as water pollution, coastal development, overfishing, a lot of different things.

1:24 And those cumulative impacts can affect not only wild, like an untouched and preserved population, but can also harm coral restoration. So there's a lot of stuff going on in this article. And I want to talk about it. I have thoughts, you know, always restoration. And this is the real crux of the matter is restoration is always more expensive and harder than preservation or conservation. Let me say that again. Restoration is always more expensive and harder than preservation and conservation. So that means if we have a healthy coral population or even a somewhat healthy coral population that has not been degraded to the point where it requires restoration, it's actually cheaper to protect than it is to bring back those corals, right?

2:08 And either, you know, farm them on land and bring them back into the water and plant them. That's always more expensive. And this is not just for coral restoration. This is for any type of restoration in the wild. Like I remember working for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, we would do restoration projects in the Great Lakes and it would cost like hundreds of thousands of dollars just to put rocks in for fish habitat. Like these are just rocks, nothing special. They're just rocks that you would normally find there. They were just dredged or they were just moved and they wanted to restore a specific fish population. They know they like these rocks of that area. They would go grab the rocks. They would get higher bars. They would bring it in. They would pile it up and it would create fish habitat. It wasn't difficult, but it was super expensive. Like hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars and you're just sitting there and you're just like, this would have been really great if we just kept it the way it was.

2:57 If we had just been proactive instead of reactive and said, hey, you know what? Let's just protect this fish habitat here in the Great Lakes. But sometimes we don't know the damage that we cause because we rush into things. Hint, hint, deep sea mining. Just gonna say it. Just gonna say it. We don't want to rush into things when we do stuff, especially as humans, that is extractive, right? Or that will alter a fish habitat. Now here in Canada, I can't speak for anywhere else, but here in Canada, I know it's a rule as part of the Fisheries Act that if you are going to harm fish habitat here in Canada, whether it's in the ocean or in freshwater lakes or rivers or streams, you have to compensate the government. You have to say, hey, you know what? I know we're going to be altering this fish habitat. So I'm going to give money to another project that's restoring fish habitat.

3:41 And that's how they got the money to do the restoration in other places, which they'll probably get money to restore the place that they're actually altering at that point at some point down the road when they realize, oh man, we really screwed up here. We shouldn't have done this in the first place. And that's not just science based. That is just a lot of public pressure, a lot of political pressure to develop and to do things in the water, in and around the water. That can harm or remove items that are critical to specific fish populations or just critical to that habitat functioning as it does. And if you remove it, it changes that habitat. Let's go back to coral reefs for a second. Coral reefs are very sensitive habitats, but they're very important. They're one of the most diverse in the world. They are beautiful.

4:22 They're a tourism hotspot. Tourists like myself, when we go down south and I'm able to go into the tropics, I'm able to either scuba dive or snorkel. I am taking every advantage to go into that water and look at corals. Look at the invertebrates. Look at the fish. I'm an invertebrate guy, so corals and invertebrates are my thing. But I love seeing a good school of fish. There's nothing like it. And also when you see stuff in pristine condition, I'm looking at little nematodes that are orange and black and they're just interacting with the coral. You're seeing a parrot fish, a rainbow parrot fish take little chips off the coral just to take the algae off and you know that coral is going to regrow because that's part of its regular functioning.

5:02 But there's nothing worse than going diving or snorkeling and you see a coral that has a disease or that is bleached. And what I mean by bleached, essentially corals have these living organisms, the dinoflagellates in them. So these phytoplankton that are in that live inside the colonies and they actually use photosynthesis to create the calcium that the limestone skeleton of the coral needs to grow. So it's a symbiotic relationship. Zuandeli is what the dinoflagellates are called and they're pretty important. They're pretty critical to the survival of these corals. Now, when the coral gets hot, like sea surface temperature and climate change cause sea surface temperature to increase, there's more radiation coming in. There's a lot of stuff that's going on.

5:43 The dinoflagellate starts to be like, this is really hot. I don't really like this. I'm going to start to tell you that I don't really like this. And it starts to expunge these little chemicals that the coral doesn't like. It says, you know what? Get out of here. You're done. You're not behaving. It's like when your mother sends you to your room or your father sends you to your room. Get out of here. You need to time out. So the zuandeli gets expunged by the coral into the water column and then it becomes white because the zuandeli give it that color. They give it the yellows, the maroons, the purples, whatever color that you see down there, the greens, the zuandeli are responsible for giving that color. If it doesn't have that color, then it's just a white skeleton and it can't get the calcium that needs to grow and eventually dies. Sometimes it can't feed itself because some will actually filter feed.

6:29 And so it dies. And that's what happens if it doesn't come back. And that means if the sea surface temperature stays hot for long, that the zuandeli can't come back and recolonize or other zuandeli can't come back and recolonize, then we have a problem. This bleaching goes away like this bleaching stays forever and the corals eventually die because they can't get the minerals that they need to actually survive right and the ions they need to survive. So that is a huge problem. And that's what's been happening when corals get bleached all over the world, not just in the Great Barrier Reef. Obviously that's something that is an iconic habitat. So we focus on there and it's huge, but it recovers every year because the temperature doesn't last as long, but every single year the hot temperature last longer and longer and longer.

7:09 Right. So if you hit 40 degrees Celsius for longer and longer days, so maybe for the first year was like five and then the second year was 10 and the third is 15. And I'm not saying it's going up to that much, but what if it does and it just continues to increase in the length of the number of days that it's hot. That's over 40 degrees Celsius that causes the zuandeli to get expunged to go to the room to go to the water column. Now we have a problem, right? Now we have a continuous to happen. So the recovery ability of the coral is less and less every year. You get what I'm saying? This is a big problem. Now what people are doing around the world, they're saying, you know what? I'm not just going to take this lying down. There's not a lot we can do about climate change on a short term factor, other like as individuals or as an organization.

7:52 Other than pressuring the government to reduce greenhouse gases, put in act and implement and follow, you know, Paris Accord agreements and all those type of Kyoto agreement back when I was younger, all these different agreements have actually followed it and they actually realize the potential of these policies that would bring us down lower and lower and greenhouse gas emissions that would allow us to get lower temperatures overall or not increase and continue to increase as we keep doing every year as a world population. Then we were able to actually fix things, but a lot of people are like, I can't do anything for that in the short term, right? Some governments are going to listen to some governments aren't and that's just what the reality is. So some people are like, I need to do something.

8:32 I need to feel like I'm doing something. I want to do something locally so that I can think globally, act locally, right? Or is it act locally, think globally? I always get confused with that. Regardless, it's a good thing to do and you want to protect the coral reef in and around your area or the habitat, like say I'm in Canada, in and around your area. Although we do have coral reefs, but they're just a little deeper and they're beautiful sponge reefs. Anyway, we do have some beautiful reefs here. But regardless, you know, you want to think a lot of people want to restore these habitats that have been degraded or have been bleached over time. So what they'll do is they'll come up with an organization, they'll get funding or they'll get ways to pay for it. So some will actually sell corals to the aquarium industry as they cut them and as they make them and as they grow them in, I guess, the aquarium tanks. And then you get to bring them out. That's how they fund them the money to actually do their best to the aquarium tank, and they're actually going to do their best to the aquarium tank.

9:17 And then what they do is they bring out the coral pieces and they attach them on to different rocks in a reef where there used to be plenty coral. Now you have a growth and it grows and grows and grows. But if you get a bleaching event again, those corals could bleach. And so is it really that important? This is what a long way of saying this is what this article gets into says global reef coverage has potentially decreased by up to 50% up to 50% with projections indicating loss exceeding 90% by the centuries and due to climate change, pollution and overfishing, right? Which we all talked about. So looking at restoration efforts is there's a bigger decrease than it can increase. So current restoration initiatives such as coral gardening and artificial reefs are insufficient against the vast scale of reef degradation.

10:03 These methods are often limited in scope, expensive, as I mentioned before, and focus on already compromised reefs. So the high cost is that restoring just 10% or 11,700 square kilometers of degraded reef from 2009 to 2018 would require over $1 billion, nearly quadrupling the total global investment in coral restoration to date. 1 billion. Just imagine that 1 billion with inflation is probably even more than that. Right? So I talked about coral bleaching and what it causes. Now the compounding stressors of overfishing and pollution make it worse. It exacerbates the effects of bleaching, stressing the coral systems and increasing the mortality rates, meaning that it has a harder time to recover.

10:48 So just think about this, this analogy, right? You're a human being, you're in decent shape, but you don't eat the best way and you're not working out. But you stay healthy, you walk a lot, say you have dogs and you go out and you walk a lot and you do a little bit of exercise, say in Keering Canada, you play hockey, maybe in the States you're playing flag football or you're playing lacrosse or you're playing soccer, you're active, right? But you have all these other stressors, you're not eating properly and you're not working out as much as you should. And that stressor can really happen. So if something happens, then the stressors make things worse, it doesn't help in your recovery to get to a healthier place. So by maintaining that health and taking away all these extra factors like eating unhealthy or not working out as much as you should, that would harm you right from a health perspective, right?

11:33 All the doctors would say that you need to eat, right? You need to exercise on a semi regular basis. And then you should be fine, but you never know. So if you get something like cancer and you already have heart disease or you're having a problem, that's going to make things worse. Well, this is the same thing with corals. If corals are stressed with algae overgrowth, right? Because of bad water pollution and high nutrients, then it's going to be working to try and get rid, not really get rid of the algae, but the algae is going to have an unhealthy effect on that coral. And then all of a sudden you bring in climate change and it's heating up the water. And that coral says, hey, to the zoo and it's like, get out. Get out. Go to your room. I don't want you in here right now it's too hot. You're causing some trouble. I need to figure this out. I got algae overgrowth.

12:14 I've got high temperatures. I've got sediment coming in from coastal development. I've got somebody's trying to fish all over us and we can't get the Parrotfish to take the algae off. This is awful. We can't do this, we can't have all of this stuff happening at the same time. So having those cumulative effects, no good. No good. The bad news is we may not be able to control climate change in the short term. The good news is we can control water pollution, we can control coastal development, and we can control overfishing. Those are the things that we can control, especially when it's near shore. So being able to control that and taking away those cumulae effects will give a chance for coral reefs to recover faster. In fact, there was a study done a few years ago, I'll have to find the link. I don't know if I'll be able to find it in time, but there was a study done a few years ago that looked at corals that were beyond borders. They were out in the middle of nowhere. They bleached and then they recovered a lot faster than those that were closer to shore.

13:03 They were getting affected by overfishing and by water pollution. So these things actually matter. And when you look at global action and you say, "Hey, look, this report without significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and the broader environmental protections, localized restoration efforts aren't really going to do anything. They're going to be really expensive, but overall, we're losing this battle." And this is not to take away from anybody who's doing coral restoration because it's really important. It's important not only to see the effects and the successes that we see locally, but it's important to get people involved and connected to the ocean. A lot of the times, these are community projects. And so the community gets together maybe with a couple of experts like scientists and conservationists and even marine aquarium hobbies that are really good at propagating corals. And they go out and they do this as a community. It's really great. It's like a beach cleanup. It gets people connected, sees what's happening out there, and then they can make changes locally as well as in a community basis.

13:55 So I don't want to take away from anybody who's doing coral restoration, but it's not the answer. If you see that happening and you're like, "Thank you for doing it." Thank the person because they're making a lot of effort and they're giving up their time. A lot of times, whether it's professionally or on a volunteer basis, they're giving their time to actually do this work, but it's not the sole answer. We can't restore our way out of this. We have to protect and we have to reduce greenhouse gases. We have to reduce pollution and we have to reduce overfishing. That's a necessity. Like we are in dire needs right now, right? We've lost less than 50% of coral student bleaching. That's not good. We need to do better. Restoration is helping. It's a tool in the conservation tool belt, but it's not the tool. It's not the thing that's going to put us over the edge to say, "Hey, you know what? We're winning the battle for coral restoration against climate change." That is a sad reality.

14:45 When you watch those videos of people going out and diving and doing that thing, thank them. They're doing great effort, but it's not the solution. It's not their fault. They're doing what they can. They're doing whatever they can do, but we need to really work on policy. We need to work on voting people in, politicians in that will actually do reduction in greenhouse gas and work and make sure that the energy sector is sustainable and it's greener than it normally is. That's what we need to do. We're not moving fast enough and we're losing these precious habitats at a phenomenal rate and we do not want to do that. So that is my call to action. Thank the people who are doing it, but understand that we need to do more from a policy basis than a political basis than any time in our history. This is dire needs, people. If you love corals, you love snorkeling on corals, you love diving on corals, you love just watching them on TV.

15:33 Well, you can't get that all the time. An AI generation of pictures and stuff as great as AI can be. It's not going to be the same as when you see a beautiful healthy coral right away. You know what? If you ever have a chance and you're a TikTok fan, go to TikTok, go to Carissa Cabello's TikTok profile and watch the videos of her looking at beautiful corals in Hawaii. They are phenomenal and so it's wonderful place to do it. It's a creator that I watch on a regular basis because she has such great pictures and she takes such a great action, right? She does what she can and we need more people like her and there are more people like her on TikTok. And in fact, if you are in the comments in YouTube or you want to hit me up with your favorite creators that show these types of things, please let me know. I'd love to get connected with them even more so than I am with others that are around that I know of. So hit me up in YouTube comments or hit me up on Instagram at how to protect the ocean or you can contact me through speakupforblue.com. Just go to our contact page. That form that you fill out goes right to my email and I try and get back to you as soon as possible. I want to thank you so much for listening to this episode of the How to Protect the Ocean podcast. I'm your host, Andrew Lewin from the True North Strong and Free. Have a great day. We'll talk to you next time and have a conservation.