Ocean resorts work to restore coral reefs
Program hopes to preserve ecosystem for next generation.
Last April, Caterina Fattori stood on a beach in the Maldives feeling frustrated. The coral reef was bleaching, turning into a ghost reef with pale, stressed corals, and she couldn’t do a thing about it except stand there, watch, and suffer along with the reef.
Fattori is the resident marine biologist at Outrigger Konotta Maldives Resort. She’s heading the resort’s collaboration with a local dive team and the German Museum of Oceanography and Fisheries in an initiative called Outrigger Ozone, a program designed to rebuild and regrow damaged coral reefs off the property’s tiny island. April’s bleaching was the latest in a series of global warming- and human-related assaults on the reef; this one attacked the reef she had already worked to restore, setting back her progress significantly.
Outrigger’s Ozone began in June 2015, joining a number of other resorts working to undo the reef damage caused by large structures on the beach, climate change, land-based pollution and the impact of fishing.
There’s a prevailing sentiment that beach and island resorts contribute to erosion and environmental destruction. Outrigger Konotta, along with Wakatobi Dive Resort in Bali, the Andaman in Malaysia, Alila Manggis in Bali, and Taj Exotica in the Maldives, aim to do the opposite. All run reef reconstruction and conservation programs.
“Programs like this have to come from the heart,” Doris Goh, the chief marketing officer of Alila Manggis, said. “We believe in being good neighbors and showing that there is sustainability in tourism and that we will protect the environment and the beauty of it for future generations.”
The coral restoration process is similar across all the resorts: broken but still-living coral fragments are attached to a frame, either metal or concrete, and the whole system is secured underwater.
It’s a slow process (coral takes about 10 years to fully grow) but with care and protection, the reef regenerates itself on the frames.
“We can plant so many, but then the coral itself has to reproduce,” Goh said. “The reproduction eventually makes it into a coral forest.”
The Andaman takes a slightly different approach. The marine biologists there have developed Asia’s first inland coral nursery, allowing guests and staff members to start the regeneration in a safe place and then transplant it into the ocean.
All of the frames coming out of the Andaman’s nursery are designed to become carbon-negative within a few years as well, to reduce the property’s carbon footprint, the general manager, Christian Metzner, said.
Guests at nearly all of the resorts can get involved in multiple ways, by helping plant the coral, attending workshops or cleaning up the reef.
Taj Exotica, the Andaman, and Alila Manggis also give visitors the opportunity to sponsor a coral frame.
Their names are engraved on the metal, or on a plaque on a concrete frame, and they can come back to check on their personal reef.
To date, across all the resorts, more than 321 coral frames have been transplanted into the reef.
The Outrigger team alone has already planted about 21,450 square feet of new coral (roughly 37 percent of their target goal, to plant a football field’s worth of coral by 2025), and at the Andaman, 200 baby corals from the nursery have made it into the ocean. One hundred more are still growing and nearly ready to transplant.
“It doesn’t matter where people live, how close or far away from the ocean,” Fattori said.
“Everybody is connecting to the ecosystem. If we don’t have healthy oceans, we cannot have life on land. If we are not taking care of the precious treasure now,” referring to coral reefs, “the next generation won’t have the possibility to admire and be amazed by all the biodiversity of the ecosystem.”