When hurricane Delta hit the coast of Mexico on 7th October 2020, experts reckoned that repairing and replanting the ravaged coral colonies of the Mesoamerican Reef (MAR) and the coastline around Quintana Roo south of Cancun could cost about USD $800,000. Rapid response was critical as broken coral dies within weeks. But government funding, predictably, could take much longer to materialise. Conservationists and local businesses alike realised that the cost of not repairing the battered reef would be greater than the cost of restoring it, as the Mesoamercian Reef is second in size only to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and home to 500 types of fish, 70 different corals, sea turtles and whale sharks. Yet, 80 percent of the living coral along Mexico’s Caribbean coast has been lost or degraded in the past 40 years due to pollution, overfishing, disease and increasingly extreme weather events. A simple and cost-effective solution came to their rescue: insurance.

A pioneering nature-based insurance policy purchased in 2019 by the Quintana Roo state government in conjunction with environmental NGO The Nature Conservancy (TNC) funded the efforts of Guardians of the Reef, a group of 80 trained snorkelers, fishermen, biologists, even local restaurant staff led by local diver Emanuel Quirago. They stabilised 1,200 affected coral colonies and removed storm debris from the beaches within 11 days. They also rescued and transplanted almost 9,000 broken coral fragments in artificial nurseries until they could be reattached to the seabed to regenerate new coral colonies. The work is ongoing and the guardians are poised to respond to future storm events if necessary.

The funds for the insurance policy came from the Coastal Zone Management Trust, set up by the state government with support from TNC and revenues were paid by beachfront property owners and hoteliers. A parametric insurance policy like this involves calculating pre-specified payouts depending on various potential trigger events – in this case, the payout varies according to wind strength. The restoration of these coral reefs, which attract over a million snorkelers and divers annually, has ecological and commercial benefits. Healthy reefs absorb 97 percent of each wave’s energy so they buffer the coast against storm damage and provide nurseries for breeding fish.

“Insurance plus government commitments paired with on-the-ground rapid response create the perfect formula to quickly repair critical coral reefs,” says Fernando Secaira, Mexico’s climate risk and resilience lead for The Nature Conservancy. TNC was able to enlist the participation of local businesses by making them aware that the health of this fragile coastal ecosystem was intrinsically linked to their economic success. “It’s a win-win and we look forward to identifying other parts of the world where this approach could work,” he says. They are exploring the feasibility of insuring reefs in regions like the Caribbean, Central America and Asia. Studies show that insurance policies like this could help protect coral reefs against natural disasters – perhaps to protect Florida reefs from future hurricanes and coral in Hawaii from marine heatwaves or coral bleaching.

Nature advocate and CEO of US-based fintech company Cultivo Dr Manuel Piñuela believes that this parametric insurance for nature-based projects will grow over the coming years: “We see innovation around insurance and reducing risk as a critical component to unlock investment into nature.”

Author: Anna Turns, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: 1. Daniela Zambrano The Nature Conservancy, all others The Nature Conservancy

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One of Australia’s great forests once grew hidden from sight off the east coast of Tasmania. Swathes of giant kelp, known as kelp forests, grew from the ocean floor, towering 30 to 40 metres into massive floating canopies across the surface of the sea. “They were charismatic, six to seven storey tall underwater jungles, basically,” says Cayne Layton, postdoctoral research fellow at Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies. “It is said that some floating canopies were so thick that they were on navigation charts as a navigational hazard.”

Today, 95 percent of this globally significant forest of the world’s fastest-growing plant – giant kelp can grow up to 50 centimetres a day – has been wiped out by the inexorable shift of the warm East Australian Current – the ocean current made famous in the movie Finding Nemo – displacing the cold, nutrient-rich Southern Ocean waters. The remaining five percent now grow only in scattered patches. The decline of these forests, listed as Australia’s first endangered marine community, has been relentless since the 1940s, largely unnoticed and unremarked by the local community. But the fightback has begun, and the early results are promising.

In the spring of 2020, Layton and a team of scientists planted three restoration plots of kelp on rocky reefs along Tasmania’s east coast, having collected spores from surviving giant kelp plants identified as tolerant to the warmer seas.

The scientists planted tens of thousands of millimetre long juvenile kelp on the reefs. When they returned months later, at the end of summer, they were greeted by a beautiful sight.

“One of the sites had no survivors, but at the two other sites we had really good success,” Layton says. “At those two now, we have over 200 surviving giant kelp. The average size is about a metre, and the largest is over four metres tall, so they’re kind of like stringy teenagers at the moment.

“The really exciting thing for us is that in those first assessments after summer, the kelp looked really healthy. That was encouraging – that the increased thermal tolerance we found in the lab was translated to the field.”

The team will again plant giant kelp this winter, and hope to do so each year into the future.

The rehabilitation of these underwater forests has been touted as a tool in the quest to mitigate climate change – great forests that absorb great quantities of carbon – though Layton cautions that the science is still young when it comes to giant kelp’s carbon sequestration ability. Such efforts, along with regrowing seagrasses, are central to marine protection as the climate warms.

Their value to the planet and marine communities, however, is unquestionable. And moment by moment, these fast-growing marine marvels are now straining once more towards the sun and perhaps even a return one day to navigation charts.

“We’re very happy (with the planting), but it’s still early days,” Layton says. “We want these individuals to grow up and become mature and start producing their own babies. Restoration is never going to work if it’s reliant on me and my colleagues planting these kelp. We’ve got to kickstart the natural cycle, so those individuals that we plant start producing their own juveniles.

“They can reach reproductive age within a year, so we’re hoping that towards the end of this year the largest ones will start to become reproductive. That’ll be the next big exciting step for us.”

Author: Andrew Bain, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Cayne Layton, Masayuki Tatsumi

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With its brilliant blue waters, the Adriatic Sea – the body of water separating the Italian peninsula from the Balkans – is a firm favourite with European holiday makers. Its shallow depth and species diversity also provide for a rich commercial fishing ground, with over 1,000 bottom-trawling vessels fishing its seas in a given week, chiefly Italian and Croatian commercial fleets in pursuit of bass, bream and mackerel.

The seafloor nets used by these trawlers are, sadly, a problem for non-commercial species too: dolphins, sharks and the sea turtles that flock to the Adriatic to feed on jellyfish and squid. Fishing trawlers inadvertently capture 6,500 sea turtles a year in the Adriatic, a phenomenon termed ‘bycatch’ or ‘wasted sea life’; over 2,000 of these turtles, it is estimated, will die.

“Bycatch is a very real problem that requires urgent attention and action,” says Lucy Babey, Deputy Director of marine charity ORCA. “Each year hundreds of thousands of turtles, sea mammals, and millions of sharks are incidentally caught and killed in fishing gear around the world.”

Sea turtle mortalities are caused by drowning, as individuals are ensnared and dragged underwater in trawlers’ nets; disorientated turtles find it difficult to change their swimming direction in order to escape through the net’s mouth.

Enter the TED, or Turtle Excluder Device, a structure fitted to the top or bottom of the trawl net that allows larger species to escape. The first TEDs, simple metal grids, were developed in the 1960s in the U.S., where green, leatherback and loggerhead turtles were routinely caught in the nets used by deep-sea shrimp trawlers. European commercial fishing fleets have, however, resisted the wholesale application of TEDs, in the belief the devices exclude larger commercial species, such as cod, as they reduce catch quality due to crushing against the grid. Traditional designs also become clogged with debris, meaning the TED can no longer either catch fish effectively or exclude turtles.

Now a new-generation ‘flexible TED’ is being pioneered in the Adriatic. Mounted on the rearmost part of the trawling net, a tubular potion known as the ‘codend’, the device, designed by marine experts at The Italian National Research Council (CNR), is a tilted escape hatch that acts like a valve, opening when it is hit by a larger weight, such as a turtle or dolphin. Additionally, the net is fitted with an accelerator funnel, to drive the fish down and away from the exit, protecting the quality of the catch.

In a 2019 pilot, CNR’s flexible TED prevented the capture of sea turtles as it affected neither the weight nor composition of the commercial catch and reduced debris capture.

The adoption of the device, says Claudio Vasapollo, a marine biologist involved in the research, “could avoid the bycatch of more than 8,000 sea turtles a year in the Adriatic Sea”. “Although,” he continues, “any solution will need to get the fishing industry on board”.
“It is a matter of urgency that governments invest in, and legislate for, effective bycatch solutions for larger species such as dolphins and turtles,” ORCA’s Lucy Babey adds, of the new-generation TEDs. “These animals play crucial roles within their ecosystem, which are at risk of collapse without them.”

Author: Sally Howard, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Turtle banner image and 3. Zdeněk Macháček & Kris Mikael Krister, 1. David Clode, 2. CNR

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For fish, rivers are high-speed traffic lanes in the same way that motorways are for humans. The Ruhr in west Germany, for example, is such a highway, leading fish to spawning and feeding grounds as well as summer or winter resting places in small lakes and tributaries. On those motorways, however, fish, just like humans, also have to deal with narrow lanes, road works or complete closures. And any such obstacle can have serious consequences for species diversity.

“Fish need unobstructed water ways as they depend on different conditions in different life stages,” says Svenja Storm, a fishing biologist at the regional fishing association of Westphalia/Lippe. “Where an adult fish finds the optimal food for itself, there does not have to be a suitable place for the positioning of spawn or the growth of the young fish. In fact, all fish species migrate in the course of their life in order to optimize their food intake, to avoid unfavourable conditions such as water bodies falling dry to increase the reproductive success.”

One man currently trying to solve this problem is Markus Kühlmann. The 53-year-old engineer has spent the last nine years transforming the 219-kilometre-long Ruhr into the aquatic superhighway it once was. At Baldeney weir near Essen, Kühlmann, together with a team of engineers, biologists, ecologists and hydraulic engineers, developed a system that is unique to the world: a continuously running elevator which transports the fish to the top of the weir.

Part of the impetus for the project, which cost a cool US $8 million, were regulations published by the European Union and the German Environment Agency which require all water bodies in Germany to be in “good condition” again by 2027. Within this regulation was the provision for every German river to be passable for fish.

There being the political will to get Kühlmann’s project off the ground, there was an immediate problem. This location in the Ruhr was not spacious enough for a traditional fish ladder (a series of pools where one is a little higher than the next to allow fish to climb the distance step by step).

Looking for an alternative, Kühlmann found novel fish elevator designs in France, Australia and the United States: “But they did not cover enough height or were created only for certain species,” he says. “We had to come up with something completely new.” He teamed up with engineers from southern Germany as well the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology to first develop a computer simulation.

The way the eventual elevator design works is simple: there’s a tube with a flexible chamber; when the chamber is at the bottom, the fish enter, get transported nine meters upwards and exit the chamber again to continue their journey. To prevent fish from queuing in front of a closed door at the bottom while the lift is at the top, the system consists of two tubes with alternating elevators. Kühlmann and his team developed specific algorithms and underwater sonars to detect when the chamber is full or if a particularly large fish – possibly a predator – is waiting in the elevator and preventing other fish from entering. (The large fish is then transported separately.) “A second software is fed with environmental data that influence the migration activity of the animals, such as season, water temperature or moon phase. That way, the operating intervals of the elevator automatically adjust,” Kühlmann explains.

After years of development, the fish elevator started operating in August 2020 and has been running round the clock since then.

Officials from other cities such as Augsburg are looking to adopt the high-tech elevator model, although Kühlmann admits the price tag of what’s currently a bespoke build will inhibit roll-out of replicas of the Baldeney fish ladder across the globe. That said, Kühlmann hopes his insights will help other regions to think more radically about how they can help migratory fish get from A to B.

Author: Florian Sturm, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Florian Sturm

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The scars of the ice age may be carved into Cumbria’s sweeping valleys and fells, but that’s not all that remains of the era.

Ennerdale Water, a glacial lake in the western Lake District, is home to England’s last migratory population of Arctic charr. Landlocked here since the ice retreated, now the fish emerge under cover of darkness each November to spawn in the adjoining river instead.

Yet that instinct has proven problematic, exposing this threatened aquatic species to water pollution in an environment where the gravel the fish use as their spawning nests was in short supply. Gareth Browning of Forestry England explains that the Ennerdale population had plummeted to around 20 spawning charr by the end of the 1990s. Having outlasted the glaciers, the charr was about to disappear from the lake forever.

At that point, local landowners stepped in to form the Ennerdale Arctic Charr Restoration project. It remains a collaboration between the Environment Agency, Forestry England and other Wild Ennerdale partners.

Unfortunately, they didn’t know much about the fish at first. “It was very much initially a discovery project,” Browning says – and this was its own challenge and led to a process of trial and error.

The team’s first intervention was to replace a crude pipe bridge on the River Liza, which was blocking water flow, hoping this would once again allow the charr to swim upriver to spawn; disappointingly, however, the population didn’t respond. It took a broader survey to discover a second bridge at Woundell Beck was blocking the flow of gravel for charr nests.

The improved river flow also helped another issue that was threatening the fish: riverine needle litter from the conifers planted beside the water courses after the Second World War. “Conifers are very good at stripping pollution out of the atmosphere,” Browning explains, “but that pollution’s quite acidic.” Allowing the Liza to flow freely reduced these harmful pH spikes as did replacing conifers in the surrounding area with native broadleaves, juniper and heathland. At the same time, the Environment Agency undertook an off-site breeding programme to boost fish stock, taking eggs from local fish, and returning the hatched fry to the River Liza.

In 2020 over 700 charr spawned in the River Liza and other once-threatened species are unexpectedly blooming too, such as the formerly extinct Marsh Fritillary butterfly.

Dr Ian Winfield has studied the link between climate change and the cold-water charr, he believes that tracking the population health of species such as the charr is key to understanding the impacts of climate change. Milder winters, he says, pose a risk to the incubating eggs of a species at the southernmost limit of their natural territory.: “They really need water temperatures similar to those of a domestic fridge in order to survive well,” Winfeld says.

The humble Arctic charr’s fate is also a barometer for the health of the Lake District, a much-prized natural environment that sees 15 million visitors each year. “If the population is doing well then the lake is doing well,” Winfield adds.

Author: Ruth Bushi, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves
Images Credit: Ennerdale banner image: Kreuzschnabel/ Wikimedia Commons, 1. Gareth Browning, 2. Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, 3. Dr Ian J. Winfield
(Wikimedia License – https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode)

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Under the azure waters of the Andaman Sea, sturgeon, parrot fish and stingrays swim past a strange new structure close to a coral reef formation. Above, a small solar panel bobs on the water’s surface. This is an artificial reef built by Indian environmental charity ReefWatch. The founders of this tiny non-profit outfit are passionate about the conservation of the magnificent coral atolls in India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands, training local divers to collect naturally broken coral fragments and implant them on to an artificial metal reef. There is, they soon realised, one basic problem with building new coral reefs: “Coral reefs grow between 0.5-7 cm per year,” says Nayantara Jain, Executive Director of the programme. “At this rate, it will take artificial reefs decades to flourish.”

So ReefWatch implemented a simple, radical strategy to enable coral to grow faster. “We hook our artificial metal reefs to a small floating solar panel,” explains Jain. The mild electric current generated by the floating solar panel helps speed up coral growth by seven to twelve times by enabling faster accretion of calcium carbonate. And the electric current leaves the coral with more of an energy budget that it can use to survive warmer temperature spells and coral disease. Jain and her small team, which includes three local youth, predict these artificial reefs could have a far-reaching impact. Just before the lockdown, the team developed a new solar panel design to make coral accretion even more efficient. With the old accretion system, coral would start re-growing within three months. “Now, perhaps it will grow faster,” Jain says. The team also creates diverse natural habitats under each artificial reef using rocks, shells and aquatic plants. “Consequently, we see an immediate uptick in marine life as soon as the artificial reef is set up,” she says.

In the long term, ReefWatch plans to develop a replicable model for coral reef regeneration which involves local stakeholders. Some of their work involves education: through workshops in schools, colleges and elsewhere, they are spreading awareness about how coral reefs protect the fragile local ecology and bulwark these islands against tsunamis and high tides. “We’re also employing local divers to salvage broken coral and maintain our new reefs,” she says. “Hopefully, this will encourage them and others in their community to look after their habitat.” Jain plans to make the project volunteer tourism-driven and hopes to entice divers and beach enthusiasts to spend some time in these picturesque islands and help build artificial reefs. “If protecting their biodiversity could generate higher tourism revenues,” she says, “the programme could eventually be taken over by the local community entirely, leaving us free to replicate this project elsewhere.”  

ReefWatch has built nine reefs so far, all positioned near natural coral formations. In time, these will mature, merge and support diversity of marine life. Each reef costs around US$2,000 and requires regular maintenance in the first few years of its installation. On World Oceans Day in June 2020, ReefWatch launched the first edition of its Adopt A Reef programme, inviting people to sponsor part of an artificial reef for US$470 per year. Within six weeks, all their existing reefs found sponsors. “The government has now allowed us to work in other areas in the Andaman Islands,” says Jain. “We want to build more reefs now…”

Images Credit: ReefWatch Marine Conservation
Author: Geetanjali Krishna, The India Story Agency for Sacred Groves

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