April 18, 2025 • 16 mins
Coral restoration is often seen as a beacon of hope for our oceans—but are we putting too much faith in it? In this episode, we dive into why coral bleaching has become an annual event, especially on the Great Barrier Reef, and whether restoration can keep up with the pace of climate change. We explore what recurring stress events mean for the long-term survival of reefs and how restoration, while helpful, might be insufficient if larger systemic issues like warming seas and pollution aren’t addressed.
Restoration is discussed not just as a solution, but as a strategy that needs to be reconsidered in light of the science. What happens when reefs bleach four years in a row? What’s the ecological and financial cost of trying to rebuild what’s actively being destroyed? This episode challenges listeners to rethink what ocean conservation should prioritize in the fight for the future of coral reefs.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
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
(00:20):
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
(00:41):
to Protect the Ocean podcast.
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
(01:02):
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,
(01:22):
overfishing, a lot of different things.
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
(01:44):
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
(02:06):
bring back those corals, right?
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
(02:26):
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.
(02:47):
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.
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
(03:09):
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
(03:30):
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.
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
(03:50):
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
(04:12):
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.
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.
(04:35):
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
(04:56):
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.
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
(05:17):
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
(05:38):
climate change cause sea surface
temperature to increase, there's more
radiation coming in. There's a lot of
stuff that's going on.
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
(05:59):
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
(06:19):
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.
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
(06:39):
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
(07:00):
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.
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
(07:21):
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
(07:41):
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.
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
(08:02):
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,
(08:22):
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.
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
(08:44):
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
(09:04):
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.
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
(09:25):
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
(09:47):
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.
These methods are often limited in scope,
expensive, as I mentioned before, and
(10:08):
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
(10:31):
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.
So just think about this, this analogy,
right? You're a human being, you're in
(10:52):
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
(11:12):
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
(11:54):
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
(12:34):
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
(12:55):
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.
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
(13:16):
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.
(13:37):
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.
So I don't want to take away from anybody
who's doing coral
(13:57):
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
(14:18):
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
(14:38):
what? We're winning the battle
for coral restoration against
climate change." That is a sad reality.
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
(15:00):
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
(15:21):
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.
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
(15:41):
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
(16:01):
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
(16:21):
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
(16:42):
and have a conservation.
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
(00:20):
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
(00:41):
to Protect the Ocean podcast.
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
(01:02):
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,
(01:22):
overfishing, a lot of different things.
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
(01:44):
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
(02:06):
bring back those corals, right?
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
(02:26):
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.
(02:47):
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.
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
(03:09):
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
(03:30):
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.
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
(03:50):
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
(04:12):
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.
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.
(04:35):
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
(04:56):
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.
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
(05:17):
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
(05:38):
climate change cause sea surface
temperature to increase, there's more
radiation coming in. There's a lot of
stuff that's going on.
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
(05:59):
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
(06:19):
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.
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
(06:39):
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
(07:00):
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.
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
(07:21):
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
(07:41):
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.
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
(08:02):
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,
(08:22):
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.
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
(08:44):
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
(09:04):
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.
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
(09:25):
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
(09:47):
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.
These methods are often limited in scope,
expensive, as I mentioned before, and
(10:08):
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
(10:31):
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.
So just think about this, this analogy,
right? You're a human being, you're in
(10:52):
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
(11:12):
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
(11:54):
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
(12:34):
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
(12:55):
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.
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
(13:16):
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.
(13:37):
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.
So I don't want to take away from anybody
who's doing coral
(13:57):
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
(14:18):
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
(14:38):
what? We're winning the battle
for coral restoration against
climate change." That is a sad reality.
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
(15:00):
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
(15:21):
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.
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
(15:41):
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
(16:01):
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
(16:21):
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
(16:42):
and have a conservation.
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