Open-ended Informal Consultative Process on Oceans and the Law of the Sea (ICP26)

Good afternoon.
Distinguished delegates.
We will continue our discussions under the first segment of the discussion panel entitled The status of Marine ecosystems and their role in Sustainable Development, New Developments, approaches and challenges.
There are six presentations scheduled for this afternoon.
We intend to hear from the first three panelists, followed as we did yesterday by a question and answer session before proceeding with the remaining free panelists.
We again wish to remind you that the discussions in the panel are informal in order to allow delegations from states, intergovernmental, and non governmental organizations to participate actively in the debate.
All panel presentations have been posted on the website of the Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea to assist delegations in preparing for discussions.
As these panels are also being broadcast over the United Nations web TV, we are also accepting questions from remote viewers.
Please email any questions and comments to Dualos at n.org.
I will now give the floor to our first panelist, Ranjit Baguli, Professor of Marine Biology and Biological Oceanography at the University of Mauritius.
The presentation is entitled Coral Reef Ecosystems and Mauritius Acids Nation Challenges and Promises.
Professor Baguli, you have the floor.
Thank you, Chair.
I'm grateful to yours and to the two co chairs for the opportunity to speak about coral reef ecosystems from Mauritius and perspective from one of the seeds nation.
Today, I'm just going to give you a brief of the Mauritian waters, some of the coral reefs that we have, the corals and the reef fish that we have and the major problem, which is a global problem, coral bleaching and mass mortality.
We have also looked at some potential local reef extinction dates, which sounds quite gloomy, but those are the realities.
Also emerging issues like coral diseases, which also linked to climate change, global warming.
There are some hope for recovery, but it's not sufficient, it's not quick enough, and of course, human intervention that has to be looked into.
However, we face a number of barriers and there are catalyst as well.
Then I'll present a bit on the call for actions.
So Yeah.
I think we've talked quite a bit about coral reefs, which provide ecosystem services of about 105,000 USD to 350,000 per hecta per year, sustaining more than 1,000 multi species and also thousands of people that depend on them directly.
However, heat waves, increasing intensity and frequency have been leading to mass mortality of corals at unprecedented spatial scales.
It is estimated that at least 80% of the reef experienced bleaching and mortality in some parts of the world 2023-2025.
On your right, you can see a picture of lizard island from Grey Barrier Reef and you see underwater, the whitish stuff, it's all coral bleaching and potentially leading to mortality if they do not recover in time.
On the lowest scale, you'll see in years, the white dots means light bleaching and the red one severe that may have led to mass mortality.
You can see the increasing intensity and frequency of these events.
Mauritius is not an exception, hasn't been spared from these events.
On your top left here, you can see the location of Mauritius and then in the bigger picture you can see Mauritius and the other islands like San Bern in the middle and further north we have an invisible island, Cadmana which is jointly managed between the Republic of Mauritius and shells.
We've looked at the coral reefs of those areas as well.
This picture just shows you the blue lines around the islands.
It's all coral reformation that provide protection and ecosystem services to the people that live on those islands.
Corals, as you can see in the left picture here, yellow brown in color.
Those are because of the algae that lives inside them, and these micro algae produce food.
They act like tenants, and the animal that hosts them act as landlords.
While under stress, what happens if the tenant cannot pay the rent, they get kicked out and the coral become white and don't have food and starve and can die if they do not recover.
These are reef fish and they are classified into different functional groups according to what they do on the reef like grazers, we eat other algae, we have scrapers, some eat some of the corals and invertebrates, and you'll see a lot of these fish, they have important ecological functions that lead also to some of the economic importance as well.
Just to give you a brief on what has been happening on coral status from 2002 and 2011, you'll see on the left, we have the free graphs and all of the graphs are going downhill.
On the right we have relative measurement and below zero means decrease.
The last graph that is the bottom right, you'll see some sites experiencing 100% mortality.
We are losing 100% of the livestff on the reef, especially the corals here.
This is really dramatic.
2020-2024, we've also done some work and This is interesting because we had the COVID event and then we didn't have much of mass bleaching events except for some cyclones.
You'll see the circles have become bigger.
It's just because of people not being out there on the reef and also very little stress going on and we have increased in coral cover.
You can see here the green triangle showing increases 20% to 40% and some decreases as well, and those are because of some of the strong cyclones we had in January 2024.
Fish biomass, again, it increased.
This is interesting.
Again, it's quite positive findings for Rodri islands also.
We have some increases, and there are some sites that are still decreasing, most probably because of local anthropogenic impacts taking place.
Reef fish also increased.
Now, the decreases that we had serious ones because of the several severe events.
We measure this in degree heating weeks.
That is the number of weeks where the temperatures went above the threshold.
You'll see in some cases we had 17 degree heating weeks and the red on the picture here, the red color means that they are being severely affected.
These are global problems that also affecting those small ions and bleaching, this is how it looks like.
Coral becomes snow white and no water and after some time you'll see brownish because algae have grown on it and it is dead.
These are some of the examples of bleaching.
There are some hopes and we think it's a nugget of hope that some of the corals can recover from white condition to brownish condition and it's still good, but it doesn't happen at too large scale.
And from these repetition or recurrence of these thermal or heat wave events, we've been able to calculate some of the local extinction dates.
I've taken examples from some of the Japanese islands and also from Mauritius in the bottom graph, you'll see that we're expecting some of most of our reefs to be locally extinct by 2070 if we continue to have such severe events, um For Sin Brendon, which is further north and we don't have much inhabitation there except for some fishing activities, we are left with some 35% coral cover, still some fish that up to 4,000 kilograms/hectare, which is still commercially viable.
Crvala which is a jointly managed area between Shell Shells and Mauritius, We have some less than 40% of coral cover.
These are deeper waters, 30 to 60 meters.
The ones for shallow coral reefs.
The ones are deeper waters, we call them mesophytic reefs, but we're still seeing lots of damage due to bleaching in these corals.
I'll just illustrate some.
You see on the top left, this is bleaching of hard corals.
On the right top once you see coral diseases, again, left bottom is bleaching and we also have predators that can Occur in outbreaks and they can eat up the whole reef within months if they continue to stay there.
This is a sea star that eats corals.
We've tried to do some restoration work.
This is an example of trying to plant some of the corals from 2 centimeters in length in size and on the reef flat, as you can see, from top left to bottom right, on the reeflat it's quite tough to actually grow corals.
Bringing back the reef sounds very difficult because these small corals can be overgrown with algae.
If the fish dynamics are not good, we don't have enough herbivores or grazes, even planting corals there may not help.
So Luckily, in the lagoon, we've seen different results from 2 centimeters to 4 centimeters, we've seen coral growing up to 1 meter in height within four or five years, which is quite interesting for this branching coral species, which used to occupy 80% of our coral reefs cover, and now it's less than 20%.
In the near coast, which is close to the shore, again, we have some positive results and you can see some searchins without grazes.
The spiny purple organisms they just feed on the algae and keep it clean and the corals can grow and have less competition with other organisms.
Then on the other side, we also have natural recovery.
These are small recruits on dead reefs and you can see they can grow quite fast.
These are table acroporate corals and we also have other recruits are branching in other corals.
There is some hope but how fast this can happen and before another heatwave hits the reef is quite problematic.
So we're stuck off waiting for natural recovery to happen, which can take years and years.
Then in human intervention using asexual propagation that is just vegetative propagation, you break off a piece of coral and try to transplant it, but we have issues with that.
Then also there is sexual rerouction in corals, where you can also propagate the larvae and try to let it grow, which brings in more genetic variation as well.
However, we have this issue of severe bleaching, which is increasing intensity and severity.
The bottom picture shows you a nursery with whitish stuff there.
So, it's not clear, but the whitest stuff is corals that have bleach that have been put there to grow to certain size and then to be transplanted on the reef.
We had our nurseries dying 80 to 90% because of the bleaching event in 2024 and 2025.
Again, we're putting lots of efforts in doing so many different things.
But again, we have the issue of all these degree heating weeks and increasing intensity and frequency.
What can be the other solution? The other solution could be looking at how to help the coral evolve faster.
U coral takes millions of years or thousands of years to evolve, but climate change is happening or warming is happening.
Uh, very rapidly within decades.
Thus, can we shift when we experimentally trying to accelerate the evolution of corals and try to keep up with the rapid changing warming climate.
There are possibilities, there are a number of techniques that have been developed.
But again, these haven't been tried.
Why should we be worried about the degree heating weeks? This is another paper showing thousands of reef sites, including some restored sites, 256 restored sites.
The top graph of diagram shows you the first year of having a maximum degree heating weeks equal to or above 20 degrees week.
In the Caribbean recently we've seen up to 22.
This is very realistic.
20, this is the first and most of the sites will be hit by those type of degree heating weeks which will kill corals.
The frequency of same is shown in the second at the bottom diagram and the number of years with that maximum happening, that is a frequency of same yellow is full, you can see many of the reefs with a yellow color.
That seems again that we need to help the corals catch up with adaptation here.
However, we have lots of barriers in trying to push the evolution of the corals and some promises are still there.
Barriers will be first race against time.
Climate change is happening very rapidly, acid evolution techniques are not evolving or not being developed as fast as it should have, and the window of recovery is decreasing with increasing frequency of these marine heat waves.
Thus we're seeing lots of dramatic reef decline around the world.
Another problem is race against environmental extremes, the intensity of these events.
Now we're also having strong cycls or storms and these bring loss of freshwater, which the corals do not like, the reefs do not like, and they are hit by these massive mortality events.
Another problem is race against governance and legislative constraints.
We have lots of governance issues and permitting issues regarding corals which are enlisted by sites as well.
So We need to increase the number of enablers to help assist the evolution programs for corals to be able to cope with these climate change events.
Catalyst would be to establish frameworks for long term funding because evolution means we have to look at more than one generation.
Most of the funding stops 2-3 years.
That's insufficient to actually look at the multigenerational, adaptation of corals.
We need to protect experimental corals and broodsock, especially both for the thermally robust and also vulnerable ones.
We also need to foster multisciplinary research.
No single institution can do this, especially among the seeds countries.
We need to join minds and forces and merge our efforts to strategically tackle this problem because resources are limited in all forms for this type of studies.
Basically, the call for actions will be to have concerted agenda for research and development with large field experiments, replicated sites focusing on multiple species, not just one or two.
We have, for example, 160 coral species.
We cannot just leave them behind.
Multi generational studies are important and then finance.
These studies require a bit of consolidated financing as well and bigger regional projects, demand, resources, and financing.
However, we should highlight that the adaptive potential of corals, they have a limit because these are biological organisms and thus, some corals will have better chances to adapt than others.
However, I should emphasize here prioritizing greenhouse gas emission mitigation remains the number one priority of action here because we need to curb that so that we can maximize the time for corals that will be available for them to adapt, even with our assistance with the human intervention.
With this, I thank Excellencies for the invitation and Dos for support and all the collaborators.
Again, collaboration.
Most of our students do the work, but we need local and international collaboration, both from the government and the private sector so that we can find some solutions to these coral reef mass mortality problems.
Thank you.
Thank you, Professor Marguli for your presentation.
I will now give the floor to our second panelist, Bruno Rodriguez De Bastiani, Senior Blue Economy, RND Analyst Ocean Pack Maritime Services.
The presentation is entitled Mangrove Restoration in the Western South Atlantic Challenges Innovations and Inclusion.
You have the floor.
G.
Sorry.
Hello everybody.
I'm going to talk about the mangrove Restoration in Brazil.
I'm a researcher.
I've been working with coastal environments for the past ten years with Rockshos, sand beaches and mangroves now, and I work currently with Ocean packed, marie services company and we are trying to help the other companies to work in a more environmental friendly way in the blue economy.
So talking about the western South Atlantic, we have a lot of mangroves, you can see in yellow, and Brazil and a few other Latin American countries collectively own the largest continue of mangrove forests in the world.
Brazil is the country with the second largest total area of mangroves.
We are behind only Indonesia.
So it gets us with a big responsibility on the ecosystem, and we know it can sink up to eight times more carbon and terrestrial ecosystems.
So it's really relevant when we are facing climate change.
I'm working currently in Guanba Bay, there is a bay in Hugenated state in Brazil.
The bay used to be fully surrounded by mangroves.
But since the colonial period, it started to be deforestated, especially by uber expansion and pollutions and aquaculture.
Uh, but there is an inner portion of the bay that is a protect area called Wait protects area, where we still have mangroves and we're trying to keep them like that and reforestate and restore what was lost.
Um.
We are using the area like a lab to try to improve the restoration process and the carbon and other environmental variables to measure them in a better way because, um Restoring mangroves and usually coastal ecosystems is super expensive compared to inland forests and since they are very important as carbon sinking ecosystems, we need to get this in a better way.
So I'm going to focus my presentation on three main challenges that we face and that I think a lot of other ecosystems, coastal ecosystems res phase two.
That is the high costs and the field difficulties limiting restoration scaling, the lack of reliable and affordable methods to monitor the restoration and assess conservative areas, and the fact that restoration models usually exclude traditional units from decision making and benefit sharing.
So I'm going to bring first a few solutions we are experiment on restoration.
Well, to begin with, we talk a lot to the local communities and work with them because they are the ones that do the heavy work in restorations and we don't want to focus our efforts in something that is not a big issue for them.
One thing they used to complain a lot about was heavy seedlings.
Usually they would get old dog food bags and put all the seedlings inside and carry like a lot of weight in their back walking in the mud to not accessible areas to do the restoration.
It was very complicated and we were trying to help them.
They also help us like pointing suitable seedling collection areas and pointing degraded areas requiring restoration and they know what happened in the past, like how this area got so degraded.
So we are always working with them and for them.
So we are trying using cargo drones for seedling transportation, especially to areas that are more remote.
This is a picture of one of our drones.
We were transporting tires actually in the mangrove area just to see if we could do that before using many seedlings.
We are also trying to accelerate the restoration process.
We developed a robot that would drill holes and it knows how to navigate and how much space you need between the rolls.
This is a smaller drone that, in this case is carrying a bottle of water, but the idea is that to carry one seedling and drop at the hole.
And the community would just go there and make cover with dirty and make sure everything is okay and help the juncture work and the robots work.
The idea it's not to replace the community, but to help and to make it faster.
We are also working in what we call a biolerator that we are taking local soil bacterias and working them in the lab.
We have a probiotic that we are going to spray in the seedlings once they are planted.
So we want to use that to inha carbon accumulation and plant resilience.
We also are developing an app that is going to coordinate all the field restoration activities.
We are going to have all the tasks and all the logistic.
If I'm far away, I can use the app to call for a drone to bring 100 white mangrove seedlings to the place I am.
Something that is very interesting is once you make a hole and plant a seedling, sometimes it dies and you plant again, then you plant another species and sometimes you don't know what happened there.
From the beginning and like that, each hole will have a GPS point and we'll be able to track everything that has happened there so we can really control the restoration.
About monetary solutions, we are using lighter sensors drone mounted to access the structure of the vegetation, the biomass.
In the left, you can see this is a huge area that we cover with lighter sensors in the drone.
We can measure carbon to assess areas.
In the right you can see us using a smartphone integrated lighter sensors to see if we can use them to track the growing of the seedlings.
You see we can count the number of leaves and we can see the thickness of the seedlings.
We are trying different things.
All of this is going to be published in scientific papers, peer reviewed so we can share with all the community.
We are also forecasting.
We're developing a carbon accumulation model with based on field data that can be adapted to other places with different field data and that we estimate the future carbon stocks from a restoration project, so we can know up ahead how much a restoration would gathers in carbon.
It will help climate management decision and also we know we need the carbon markets and we need to talk about blue carbon credits and everything.
We are assessing the biodiversity in the mangroves, but we are using environmental DNA.
I don't know if everybody know this methodology.
I'll explain we take samples of water or in this case, sediments and we can see through DNA analysis like tiny pieces of animals like the walk by or poop there.
You can take small samples of DNA and you can see everybody that was around there.
So we are doing that because it's a fast way to assess biodiversity in the conventional ways.
But we have a problem that is most because you get the DNA from a sample and then you compare that code with DNA bank that have all the codes for the species, you have to compare it to know what it was there.
But the problem is most of the DNA banks we have are focused on North species, North Globe species, and we are on the south and we don't have we get sometimes up to 70% of our analysis, we don't know what it is.
We are starting another project where we want to build a South Atlantic focused on marine data Bank of DNA.
We are still seeking additional funding for this project, but we're starting and we really want to do that.
It would make much easier to assess biodiversity.
About community solutions, First, I like to tell how they act as local sentinels for us because in my case, my office is only an hour and a half by car together, but sometimes you are much further away and you can see the weather in Google, but you can see if there was a den release upstream and the mangrove is floated and you won't be able to work.
Or if there is a disease carrying mosquito outbreak happening, then you shouldn't go to work.
You can see a community person trying to go to the field and his hand is all bugs trying to bite him.
This is very complicated.
Unfortunately, in remote areas in the south Globe, it's common to have organized crime activities, so they can alert us if something is happening and we shouldn't go to the field.
They really improve planning, logistic and field safety for us.
Unfortunately, these commits usually they don't have basic likelihood secured.
They sometimes lack for the very little.
And they may be harmful to the mangrove as only resource like overfishing or things like that.
It's more common in Africa, in Brazil, but to deforestate like to get the timber to light ovens because they don't have another way to cook.
So this is a thing it doesn't matter if you restore, we need to get them another income sources, otherwise they don't have a choice.
So we are trying to support the Equatorins there that now they are understanding they can benefit from the mangroves conserved.
We suggested then about ingles be keeping the mangrove because propolies and honey were made from mangroves, they can be sold for a good price on the market, we suggest that and they really got into it and We got specialists to teaching them how to do beekeeping of this single native species in business class on how to sell it after.
We got them 60 boxes of six types of single native bees.
We are also trying to support the the community basic meals they have.
So when we go there and before going to field, we have breakfast there and they would cook special meals with things they get around and they have a specific culture.
So we'd have lunch there, all the money that we are already going to spend, somehow, we try to spend there, you know, they are our logistics.
So we store things there and we would pay some rent to store and everything.
But to finish, I'd like to talk a bit on the mangroves.
What I fear sometimes is that people we won't see as carbon sinking places and it's potential, remember, it's a complex ecosystem that provides many other things as cost of protection, food security, human well being and so many other things.
This is me the mangroves and you can reach me through this email and through this cell phone and this R code will take you to the project website.
That's it.
Thank you.
Thank you, miss Demsani for your presentation.
I now wish to give the floor to our third panelist, Seve akodi, Chair Professor of the Department of Aquaculture and Fisheries at Wamba University of Sri Lanka and Chairperson of Marine Environmental Protection Council of Sri Lanka.
The presentation is entitled a Science backed Inclusive Paradigm for Coastal Wetland Restoration.
You have the floor.
Co chairs, Excellencies, distinguished guests.
Thank you very much for giving the podium for me to talk about science backed and inclusive paradigm for coastal wetland restoration and also allow me to wear the hat of a practitioner, not a scientist today, because what I'm going to speak is based on what we practice back in Sri Lanka, mainly with the Department of Wildlife Conservation and the Department of Forest, but also with the other great agencies whose logos are shown here.
So let me start with the science, the great science, which is really indicating business as usual, is not going to allow us to enjoy the wetlands for a long time.
Now, once we know this science as a scientists, I also wanted to use this science in order to convince the coastal communities why it's so important that we both conserve and restore science.
However, when it comes to science, it's quite complex.
Translate in high level scientific assessments into meaningful community action is not an easy thing.
What really required for me was to look for opportunities to take this science, but also convert it into action.
But then it's difficult because science comes with its own probabilities and confidence limits.
Then how do I use this science with confidence to create and catalyze community action and also to do things? Then I turned into other things like these great models that show what would happen.
But then soon we realized People living in coastal areas in most developing countries, think about the day and its income, not the next 50 or 100 years.
So as such, though the changes were so evident right in front of them, like this mangrove island that is vanishing off in Sri Lanka, it wasn't easy to turn this science and to catalyze people because what we soon identified was that fear is a very effective tool in grabbing attention, but it doesn't allow you to come up with sustained in action.
So we had to change the game.
The things that we do to ensure that people take part in action is what I'm going to present you today.
When it comes to mangrove restoration, in Sri Lanka, we adopted ecosystem approach to restoration, and that was done with pre assessments and also with long term monitoring.
It was also done with people participation.
In order to do that, We didn't use the scientists a lot.
We use the youth that came in to work with us, to do research, and they were the most trusted component in the entire game for the local communities who provided them the transport, who heard what they were doing and whom they could approach easily to know what was really happening.
It's through them they untangled the science that I was struggling to put in front of them.
It was through them they understood that the mangroves are important and that they could provide services that are quite important to sustain in their livelihoods, but also they understood the other ecosystem services provided by the mangroves.
Unfortunately, these things came into a reality when Dittoa cyclone hit Sri Lanka and when it took off most of their lives and also the properties.
Then for the first time, they understood the pictures I showed earlier, but the real things that were happening in their back door.
With that, one thing remained unchanged.
That is, the restoration that we did and the fact that they stood the floods and also slow down the floods gave community a new purpose and a new meaning to restoration.
With that, I would like to talk about also a few other things.
Certain things as a practitioner, we learned what hinders positive action of coastal ecosystem conservation and restoration.
Well, One very important thing globally is the incomplete understanding of coastal vegetation types.
At the moment, many important coastal vegetations remain not correctly classified.
For an example, all these sedge Russian grass dominant salt marshes I have indicated here in the tropics are not yet classified as salt marshes.
Because of that, what really happens is sometimes important salt marshes are converted into mangroves because they are not correctly identified.
Therefore, synergies between global wetland classifications is a very important need.
Classifications like rams, classification global ecosystem typology needs to be brought together so that actions can be done correctly and through that, we would also be able to give the due recognition to the coastal ecosystems.
Secondly, it's so important not to be nostalgic.
And we must always assess what can truly be restored.
Why do I say so? This is a degraded mangrove area that has been converted into a shrimp farm and abandoned.
But over the time, nature has selected salt marsh to be the thriving ecosystem.
We have to respect nature's choice rather than going rather than being nostalgic and trying to convert it back to mangroves.
At the same time, if we don't do that, we create greater harm than something good.
For an example, what you see here is some essential mud flats being forcibly converted into mangroves and that's because we love trees.
When we think about restoration, we think about trees, but restoration is not just trees.
It's the same thing.
This is a really important seagrass bed that is getting converted into mangroves because of the same problems that I've been talking about.
Thirdly, It's so important to understand the complexicity of the vegetation and also the fact these ecosystems have their own zonation.
Because if we don't do that, globally, what's happening is in the name of rest We are using only a few species to caught some like rhizopora.
What is so important is to understand mangrove ecosystems and all the other coastal ecosystems are very complex and they have their own zonation.
I think that is exactly why it's important that countries invest on coming up with their national guidelines tailor made to each country like what Sri Lanka has done.
How can we make meaningful changes? Meaningful changes are very much positive.
To do that, we need to lead with co benefits.
What is so important is we have to flip the narrative so that there is also immediate and tangible benefits that the communities can see.
That doesn't stop at taking communities for the restoration.
It should evolve to upgrade in their livelihoods, making them understand that there are other horizons through which they can prosper.
It should also be very, very important to understand apart from measuring carbon, we should also measure other things like when you restore a degraded coastal ecosystem, what's the role of it in retaining groundwater? It's also very important that we look for indicators that show the overall success.
If the coastal ecosystem restoration is for the ecosystem services, the indicators should show it and that could be your biodiversity that returns that was not there.
And it could be many other things.
Also, it's so important to emphasize the regeneration and the agency because it's not about blind optimism.
We have to come up with credit build path forward.
In order to do that, what is also important is thinking about the relationship between wetland and water.
At the moment, and the relationship wetland and water is not very much discussed together, so those synergies are quite important.
Finally, what is so important is to shift the messenger.
When you bring in the total picture and indicate that the coastal ecosystem restoration is for multiple services, and also when you can click the things together like the fact that global water bankruptcy is already here and when it can be told not by the government officials or by scientists like me, but by the youth.
If those community members that hear it, if they are the champions and if they are the people that take the story back to whom it is listened to and it's adhered to, and then they support you.
Let me conclude by this.
It's so important to follow the nature and its rhythms.
I think it's the most important thing.
And we can be hopeful that we can lead the rhythms back to motion, but it has to be done with the people and it should be done for the people and while assisting people and your meal, that is your monitoring evaluation, learning and adaptation will ensure a meal for many.
With that, I thank you.
Thank you so much for the presentation.
The floor is now open for questions and comments.
I I see Belgium, you have the floor.
Yes.
Thank you.
I had a question for Bruna.
It's impressive to see how the communities are so involved.
I was wondering, are it mostly older people or it also younger people that you have participating and what do you do if you have a lack of a community? Do you think it's still feasible to do the research you're doing or without a community, makes it very difficult.
He Santa.
Honestly, I'm not sure if it's possible to do with fatty community, but I think there's always a community.
Maybe there's a community that is not involved with the ecosystem and is working with other things and lost its cultural part.
But there's always some there and it's not always easy.
We have some debates and sometimes there's people that doesn't agree and we have an NGO that helps us to work with the community.
If we have a problem, they will go in the middle and try to help and Well, there's older people and there's really young people that's doing technician course or something and goes to work with nature because got inspired by older project and now it's coming back and now it's working in a new project.
We see sometimes kids that like to hear what we're doing and we have pretty older people.
One of the Koo units that we work with is actually it's from escaped, former Africans from the colonial period.
They are the descendants and they have a specific culture and they have a territory they claim, then they leave and they would have specific ways of life and cultures and we try to work with them and try to do even things that are not about the project to help them reclaim officially their territar and everything.
But it's not always easy.
Sometimes we can hire everybody from the community from the project and sometimes we have people that is jealous and will have to deal with the situation.
It's very important for having an NGO, I think especially since we are a private company and that can be easily not well seen.
It's very important that you just don't go and Thank you, you know what you're doing.
We have a local NGO.
I think if you find something like that, they can help you navigate through the community.
We have a long history with this community.
We have a previously project where we simply sponsored mangrove Restoration because it was something the company was interested.
Now we are doing research.
We are doing research actually with an oil and gas company is paying for us just to do research because they interested for the future.
That's it.
Thank you so much.
I have a question from a panelist.
I'll have to ask you to introduce yourself because I can't see which one.
Thank you.
Now, thank you, Christina Berder from Canada Community growth Restoration Initiative.
I have a question about the community involvement in Sri Lanka in the wetlands, especially the stories about the youth bringing the message to their communities, which is a wonderful way to do that.
I would love to hear more about how this is being done and how the youth are introduced to the topics and the science behind them and how generally that message gets transferred.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you for the question.
Actually, the whole thing started with the Department of Wildlife Conservation and the Department of Forest coming up with MOUs, with non governmental agencies, and also inviting universities to take part in mangrove restoration.
And with that, what it also provided was an opportunity for the universities to think about the pending or the gaps where the research is required.
At the same time, Ministry of Environment under which all the mangroves are managed, they also came up with the National mangrove policy and the action plan.
Action plan identified all the research areas and the gray areas.
What's really happening now is the non governmental agencies and the government and the universities are creating areas and also mini laboratories so that the youth can come up with their research topics and they are facilitated to stay there and do research.
Not only we do that, we have also started working with the private sector that have come forward to give scholarships for these youth to do research.
We have got some private sector agencies that have come up with mini laboratories so that they can work.
At the same time, we are trying to promote as many opportunities as possible for them to come up with international relationships with other international agencies.
Many countries, many international universities are working with us, it has now come to a point where many undergraduate researchers are waiting to do a research with mangroves and also other coastal ecosystems.
That has not just stopped there.
The young officers of both the departments are now also getting into research as a part of their day to day work.
It's very interesting to see when you create the platform, how many people want to really get engaged and how it is exactly supporting us to change the things and also to improve the things we do.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for your comments and explanation.
I see no further speakers on my list.
We will now proceed with the remaining three panelists for this morning.
Let me now give the floor to our fourth panelist, Philippe Cousteau, ocean entrepreneur, filmmaker, and innovator.
They are unfortunately unable to be with us in person today, but have recorded their presentation regarding Voyage region.
I can ask the secretary to proceed with the presentation.
Hey, everybody.
Thank you so much for inviting me to join you, albeit in a prerecorded message.
Unfortunately, I could not attend in person.
My name is Philippe Cousteau and I am the CEO and co founder of Voice Region, and I'm excited to share what we're up to with you all of such a distinguished gathering today.
Savoise region is a commercial enterprise that was founded about a year ago, but it is the culmination of decades of work.
About 25 years ago, I met a scientist named doctor David Vaughan in Florida and he was pioneering the use of aquaculture corals, land based farms based systems in order to grow those corals to sell into the ornamental aquarium trade in order to reduce the pressure on wildcat corals that is currently and still to this day, the primary source for corals in the ornamental industry.
I and when I met him, I said, Dave, do you think that we could actually grow corals for Wild reef restoration? He said, I don't know, but we can try.
We launched the coral reef restoration Initiative in 1995.
It was the world's first effort to aquaculture corals for wild restoration.
Doctor David Vaughan has gone on to pioneer the techniques that are utilized around the world like micro fragmentation, infusing, et cetera.
However, a few years ago, we sat down with extreme frustration that in that intervening 20 odd years, humanity has lost thousands of kilometers of reefs, but only restored about 1 square kilometer of reef.
We spent a lot of time thinking about what needed to be true in order for us to unlock scale.
That is the question before us, ladies and gentlemen, is how do we unlock scale and prevent the disappearance of this critical ecosystem, which is certainly possible within our lifetimes.
What we realized is that in order to unlock scale, we needed to launch a commercial venture and not simply a research project or a philanthropic project.
We know that after about a year of building out of pro forma and looking at what it would require in order to actually restore 2,500 kilometers of reefs over the next 20 years, it turns out it's about 1.3 billion corals and $25 billion, a scale of resources and investment that philanthropy could never hope to meet.
How do we build a commercial approach that can actually scale? That is what we set out to do and that is what we have done.
We announced the company in partnership with the King Abdullah of Jordan at last year's United Nations Oceans Conference.
What we realized is key to thinking about coral reefs and unlocking scaled capital for coral reefs and solving critical problems that are left behind when coral reefs disappear is thinking about corals not as snorkeling and pretty fish, but as infrastructure because of course, they are critical coastal national infrastructure.
Of course, coral reefs can absorb, as many of you know, I'm sure, 97% of storm surge and reducing wave height by up to 84%.
Yet when reefs disappear, there are catastrophic consequences for both the communities that rely upon them, for our security, for food security, for tourism, and of course, for protection of onland coastal infrastructure.
Coral reefs are the single best tool that we have to protect tropical coastlines.
They indeed provide a reef shield, if you will, along coastlines and when they disappear, catastrophic consequences occur.
We believe that humanity deserves better than the current approach and we combine technology and nature to create commercially scalable living marine infrastructure.
Essentially, we build living reef systems as coastal infrastructure to protect shorelines and grow coastal economies that strengthen over time.
We're at an interesting point in time.
We believe that this moment, just even two years ago, did not exist.
We have a customer base that is urgently seeking solutions and we have technology that has crossed a threshold, technology like artificial intelligence, machine learning, three D construction printing and materiality and new science.
Of course, capital and policy began to align.
People are starting to recognize that this is an investable asset, and also governments are realizing, as you all do, that this is a critical asset we cannot afford to lose.
Now, traditional methods of coral restoration are artisanal.
They are based off of the micro fragmentation technologies that doctor Vaughan pioneered, but very small scale, and that artisanal approach limits their scale.
For example, oftentimes, what you'll do is you'll have maybe a dozen different fragments, you'll have some divers attaching epoxy to those fragments and attaching those fragments to various different substrate that may exist or sometimes reef balls, et cetera, some artificial small scale reef systems designed really to boost biodiversity.
While that's beneficial, again, the scale is very, very limited.
And so what we do is actually think about coral reefs as infrastructure and how we regenerate the physical and economic value of coral reefs in order to not lose the enormous value that they provide to us every year, trillions of dollars in global services and value, the protection of shorelines, the hundreds of millions of people that rely on reefs for their livelihood and protection, of course, for tourism, fisheries, et cetera.
And reefs also have tremendous opportunity for biomedical research as well.
We'll get to that in a second.
So we build living ocean infrastructure.
Our primary product is called Boise Shield reef, because indeed that is what we are doing.
We are rebuilding the shield functionality of these ecosystems.
We combined three D printed large scale reef foundations that are designed with some of our partners like Arab Technical University of Delft and Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.
To design the structures to actually mimic the hydrological function of traditional reefs so that they can absorb and diffuse storm surge, not stop it and disrupt the hydrology up and down the coast like traditional sea walls do, which, as we all know, are not a real effective solution.
We rapidly grow heat tolerant corals on land based farms, and then we install those foundations on the seabed and then install those corals on top of those foundations.
We have an ongoing monitoring system.
We're training our AI models as we speak in order to monitor those reefs and then maintain them as needed.
Because we cannot transport corals all around the world.
These farms are relatively local and we believe that just like any other infrastructure, ports, roads, and rail, for example, when they break down when something goes wrong, you don't just say, good luck, you do something to fix it.
Maintaining these reefs is critical and that builds economic opportunity and providing jobs in local communities and also de risking coastal development.
There's multiple benefits to this approach.
We tap into initially the key technological innovation that doctor Vaughan pioneered is the micro fragmentation where you break corals into small little pieces, actually cut them, and that stimulates them to grow quickly.
In six months, we can have silver dollar or so size fragments.
We track the genotypes of those fragments, we place them onto a structure and about six months later, those fragments because they're the same genotype, rather than fighting with each other, they will begin to fuse back together.
Within a total of two years, like this picture right here, we have fully fused dinner plate size sexually mature corals.
Now this is important because it accelerates the growth of corals up to 20 X, but really accelerates evolution much more than that.
From one single piece of coral, the size of my fist, we can get somewhere 120-150 micro fragments with about 20 or so micro fragments per dinner plate size coral.
In two years, we could have a dozen large dinner plate size coral heads that would take up to 75 years for one to grow in the wild.
We can select heat tolerant corals from the wild and propagate them rapidly and replace them back onto the reef.
This is something that would happen naturally anyway, but on a geological time frame and we just don't have that much time to wait.
Indeed, those corals can also be and we have done it bred, at this size, they're sexually mature.
They have spawned in our farms, and we've captured that spawn and created more diversity in geotypes than actually exist out on the reef.
So there's a extraordinary opportunity here to accelerate the growth, replant heat tolerant corals.
You've harvested a small stock from the wild, grow them out, and then replant them on these large scale structures that we implant to restore that biodiversity, but also that shield functionality of reefs.
It's an extraordinary technology.
So this is how it works.
We have large scale coral farms, three D construction printers, we place those on the seabed with either underlying three D printed material, stone, rock, or existing substrate, and then we can monitor those using our A models and drones over time.
But what else happens here that's very interesting is this unlocks adjacent markets.
Aquaculture corals are far more resilient than wildcat corals.
The mortality of those aquaculture corals is much lower when they are sold into the ornamental industry.
That is an industry that is worth just over $6 billion predicted, as you see here, to be around $12 billion by 2030 globally.
It's a huge market, but the supply of wild corals is declining, the demand is increasing, and this is a tremendous opportunity to build economic value for those farms and for those corals and create local community based jobs to maintain these farms over a long period of time that is both selling into the ornamental industry, but then also utilizing a stock to help restore and maintain those reefs as they get impacted over time.
It also unlocks the ability to sell into the pharmaceutical and biotech market.
There is demand for coral based species already FDA approved drugs derived from sponges, for example, but biotech companies are unable to source the amount of material that they need of individual genotypes to be able to test them for novel pharmaceutical medical compounds.
We, on the other hand, are able to harvest those corals and then propagate them on demand, different genotypes that we can track, et cetera, and sell those into the pharmaceutical industry.
There are adjacent markets that are unlocked with this approach that provide long term economic opportunity and growth in the blue economy for local communities and that's key.
We also believe, as my grandfather, Jacques Bustau always said, you cannot build environmental sustainability without human sustainability.
We recognize that this needs to be local efforts that are training local people to support and do this work.
Fundamentally, we are about growing tourism, about increasing fisheries, yes, but also protecting coastlines.
We catalyze new sector growth like aquaculture and three D printing and AI and develop local capacity and workforces because it's local employment, local people that are employed and trained on these farms and in these facilities with three D printing, coral propagation, AI and the digital skills, institute restoration, et cetera So we're focused on, really the world, but really three main target markets right now, the Middle East, Mediterranean and actually bleeding now into the further east into the Indian Ocean in India, of course, the Coral Triangle and the Caribbean and Mexico.
Already in just 12 months, we have established projects all around the world and establish assembled an extraordinary cohort of partners.
This takes in order to be successful, really individual partnerships and expertise in finance, in technology, in marine biology, community development and workforce development, and AI and monitoring.
These are just some of the companies that we partner with at Boise E Region in order to deliver our solution.
Our first project is being installed in Jordan in just a few short well, about Yeah, just under a year.
We developed and deployed a facility there.
Phase one of the facility.
Now we're designing Phase two, I'll get to that in a second.
We're going to be ramping up that expansion in Jordan.
In March 19th of 2025, this was the Marine science station in Ackba in Jordan, and it was essentially a derelict facility, doing some research in some of the buildings, but a lot of them were abandoned.
Um, and in partnership with the Jordanians, who did an extraordinary job, in just a few short months, we've transformed that space and deployed a facility that had offices and labs, and aqua culture facility that now on the ground, we have about 20 to 30,000, probably about 30,000 corals now in our farm, and we'll be expanding that with another 100 tanks to be a quarter million corals a year farm minimum at this facility, and then a three D printing facility.
These are some photographs of what we've achieved in Jordan, what we can do when we want to move quickly in under a year, and so much more to come.
So pretty exciting.
We are already in the schematic design of the next phase of development to develop a blue economy hub that's centered around all the different partners and technologies that we're bringing together to make this successful and also develop aquaculture and a few other industries in this area.
So this is what the large scale coral farm will be one of the largest in the world.
Um, and we'll be expanding into India to build 1 million coral farm over the next year into Mexico, looking at cold water reefs, not with corals, but simply with the structure or overlaying oysters, and we have an investor bringing us into the Mediterranean and Malta, working in Florida, where Dave's primary research farm is, Indonesia, et cetera.
Lots of expansion, conversations about Mauritius, for example, um, with the ambassador that may be amongst you just now.
And so we're very excited about the momentum that we've built for this facility.
So that is my time Thank you so much for allowing me to share a little bit of what we're doing at Boise Vw Region in order to scale the restoration of coral reefs as critical work.
If we don't take action and scale that quickly, then coral reefs will be gone.
But the good news is there are solutions.
We are building partnerships and we would love to hear from you and be a part of what you're trying to do.
It's certainly a tremendous challenge and there's a lot of bad news around coral reefs.
But there's also good news in the potential and the technology exists to scale the restoration of these critical ecosystems and improve the lives of the hundreds of millions of people that rely on it and protect the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Of land based shore based infrastructure that also relies on those reefs.
Thank you all very much for the work that you do for giving me an opportunity.
I hope to hear from you.
I hope you can find opportunities for collaboration.
In fact, I know we can and together, as I sit here, we can rebuild healthy and abundant reefs.
Have a wonderful rest of your day.
I would like to ask the Secretariat to pass on our thanks for the presentation.
The fifth panelist is Janean Adams, professor, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa, Deputy Director of the Institute for Coastal and Marine Research, Cheerful Shallow Water ecosystems.
They are unfortunately unable to be with us in person today, but have kindly recorded their presentation regarding priorities for the restoration of blue carbon ecosystems.
I ask our Secretariat to proceed with the presentation.
Good afternoon, everyone.
It's my great pleasure to present on the priorities for the restoration of blue carbon ecosystems.
I'm Janine Adams.
I'm from Nelson Mandela University in South Africa and my research is on the coastal ecosystems with an interest in the restoration specifically of blue carbon ecosystems.
We know that marine ecosystems are under pressure, some of the global drivers are climate change, habitat degradation, pollution.
But restoration recovers biodiversity, ecosystem functioning, and the ecosystem services that underpin human well being and sustainable development.
In this presentation, I'll talk a little bit about mangroves, salt marsh, and seagrass restoration.
In particular, mangrove restoration has made good progress, but there is some lag in the other restoration activities associated with salt marsh seagrass kelp forest.
Coral reefs remain in a critical state globally and the time for action is now.
My focus then is on blue carbon ecosystems which are globally important.
They occur in the intertidal zone of marine ecosystems, and they capture carbon dioxide from the air stored in the sediment and plant material, so they can assist in climate change mitigation.
Besides carbon storage and sequestration though, blue carbon ecosystems also play a role in water quality regulation, cultural importance, they have a habitat for aquatic invertebrates.
These are all the ecosystem services or benefits associated with healthy blue carbon ecosystems.
A single restoration action can result in multiple benefits.
This is one of our case studies where there was a very polluted stormwater canal going into a estuary, and there was an opportunity to divert this polluted water to an abandoned commercial salt pad.
This was a single restoration action, taking this polluted water, putting it into the dry salt pan, which then became a very important aquatic habitat again, multiple water birds returned to that ecosystem, and also it acted as a natural water purifier.
Here we have an example of a single restoration action leading to multiple benefits.
When we consider restoration, it should be looked at as a socio ecological system.
In this particular study, our goal was to restore aquatic habitat, our implementation was to divert stormwater, and then we monitored both the ecosystem health, the state of the salt pan, the physical conditions, salt marsh extents, the threats.
We looked at ecosystem services, and then we also looked at the state of the societal system.
Any improvement in water quality is going to improve human health.
That particular site is used for baptisms and other cleansing ceremonies.
It's important that water quality is of the best standard.
The removal of a single pressure can be the first step on the restoration continuum.
In coastal ecosystems, if we understand the pressure or the threat to that ecosystem, and removing that pressure is one step on the restoration continuum.
This is the Society for ecological restoration continuum from one all the way to a fully recovered native ecosystem.
Restoration on blue carbon ecosystems remains on two main drivers.
These ecosystems occur in tidal environments and so without tides, regular daily tidal flushing, where salinity is maintained, where sediment balance is maintained, they struggle.
And also in arid and semi arid environments, if the freshwater inflow, for example, to estries has been cut off, then we have hyper saline conditions occurring and a decline in the health of blue carbon ecosystems.
Maintaining hydrological connectivity is a key for the health and the restoration of these habitats.
One of our case studies and this was passive restoration, we didn't need to go out and plant anything, but you can see the green corridor of plants there.
This is at the Orange River mouth, an arid area on our west coast of South Africa and here a road was cutting connectivity of the freshwater environment to the dry salt salt marsh habitat.
Removal of that road and this was done through the Working for Water Program, you can see the people on the left there.
It was also a form of job creation.
Removal of the road allowed for connectivity and seed dispersal.
With the freshwater that came back into that environment, also came the seeds, and the salt much was able to grow back naturally again.
This, of course, would result in multiple benefits, carbon storage, nutrient removal, habitat for fisheries, and increased biodiversity.
I'm just going to look briefly at the status of mangrove salt marsh and seagrass restoration, the global status, and what is being said.
Global assessments have indicated that mangrove loss cannot be halted by 2030.
Even though good progress has been made in restoration, there is still a decline in mangroves globally, Mangroves give us a very good example of where community participation and co management has resulted in successful mangrove restoration, there is a lot to learn from this.
The participatory approaches that build local capacity and ensure inclusive decision making are essential.
And also the inclusion of local traditional ecological knowledge is integrated often in mangrove restoration actions.
In terms of the physical processes, restoring hydrology is successful as well as planting mangroves.
Here we have some examples of very good restoration where communities have been involved and there's been planting of mangroves and good survival success.
This is from Pempa Island in Zanzibar, Tanzania.
Here are some of these salt pan habitats, they were reclaimed, restored for mangrove growth, and on Pemba Island, mangrove nurseries were established for restoration, and this was for the delivery of multiple ecosystem services because functional, thriving mangrove ecosystems would provide carbon storage, fisheries, livelihoods, and coastal protection.
In East Africa, we have a Western Indian Ocean mangrove Network, where we share best practice, particularly on restoration activities.
It's a good example of science to action.
It is scientists and researchers working with management and government authorities.
We have a regional mangrove action plan.
Where restoration and rehabilitation of degraded mangroves is key.
We're looking at standardized reporting and monitoring.
It's important to promote community livelihoods.
They're very closely linked to the health of the blue carbon ecosystems and enhance public education and awareness of mangrove ecosystems is another objective, securing financial resources and working together to implement this regional mangrove action plan with an understanding that although we have different countries along the East Coast, a regional plan will improve the restoration and health of mangrove ecosystems.
Globally, salt marsh restoration has taken place and there is success.
It's less common, but the projects that have been reported on have shown high success.
We now have a World salt marsh Day just celebrated on the 11th of June and this year's theme is celebrating the amazing biodiversity of salt marshes around the world.
There's a infographic showing the superpowers of salt marshes, their biodiversity boosting, mood lifting, flood busting, carbon sinking and water purifying.
And also the salt marsh breakthrough that was launched last year was a global initiative launched at the UN climate talks.
He global targets we set for salt marsh is for 50 countries to integrate salt marshes into policy frameworks by 2030, to conserve and restore 500,000 hectares by 2030, and to mobilize 5 billion by 2030 for salt marsh conservation and restoration.
These are ambitious targets, but it places an emphasis on the importance of restoration of salt marsh aligned with the various and global frameworks.
Global seagrass restoration, Seagrasses, their roots are in the substrate and their leaves are in the water column.
They can grow intertidly or subtdly.
The restoration is tricky because it's often constrained by external pressures.
To achieve net gain in seagrass coverage globally, conservation of what remains is a priority.
This is because restoration is quite difficult and tricky.
Thereafter, one can consider large scale active planting, which has shown some success.
What are these external pressures? It's nutrient enrichment, runoff from agriculture, wastewater, developed areas, and sediment.
These cause algal blooms which change the light environment and cause seagrass to die back.
They're very sensitive to grow, they need adequate light and once this happens, the environment is disturbed and hard to get back unless the external pressures are controlled.
That indicates that restoration has to take a holistic approach across seascapes, catchment to coast or source to sea, ridge to reef.
This is to ensure connectivity and address pressures beyond restoration site boundaries.
If you're working in a downstream estuary, you have to consider the restoration of the catchment as well.
These coastal ecosystems, they're dynamic, they're complex, they pose challenges to restoration, and that is why restoration has to also take an adaptive learning by doing approach.
Never be afraid to go out there and test something, but one doesn't quite know what the result might be.
You should be learning from your approach in an adaptive management cycle.
On top of that, we have climate change which is shifting baselines.
Even though we're restoring, an extreme event might come along and it can change the ecosystem.
Once again, adaptive management is essential for dealing with the unknowns of climate change.
The seascape connectivity, the five seascapes of seascape ecology was recently described as context configuration, connectivity, consideration of skill and culture.
The major recommendation or take home story from this study was that recommendation must focus on the recovery of interconnected habitats across the land sea interface.
A recent study assessing the success of marine ecosystem restoration and knowing that 66% of our coastal areas are already altered or degraded, this showed that successful interventions did depend on methodology, maintenance thereafter sites, whether the sites were selected appropriately, and what other conservation measures were taken to protect the sites.
Unsuccessful interventions were related to unsuitable environmental conditions.
For example, mangroves are sometimes planted in seagrass habitat and that's just destroying one habitat at the expense of another.
Extreme events, which of course are hard to predict and can alter the restoration trajectory, inadequate methods or just using the wrong species at the wrong site, thus having reduced ecological knowledge.
There are various other challenges such as overlapping governance frameworks, property rights.
It's hard to restore an area if you don't know who it belongs to, equitable benefit sharing, knowledge and capacity gaps, and lack of course of adequate financing.
But there's increasing global opportunities for capacity building, sharing of best practices and lessons learned.
I showed a little bit of this, what we're doing in East Africa through our Western Indian Ocean mangrove Network.
We also have a seagrass network.
The other international collaboration examples are the UN Ocean Decade Program for Blue Carbon, and then the International Blue Carbon Scientific Working Group run by Conservation International.
This has been driving the science behind blue carbon research and restoration for many years.
Locally, we have the International Atomic Energy Agency through its rap for African projects.
Here we are establishing regional capacities to assess the importance of carbon sequestration in aquatic systems.
This is us as a group of people in Africa sharing our knowledge and working together.
Then restoration offers a very important transdisciplinary space for innovation.
It includes multiple disciplines.
It harmonizes links between disciplines in a coordinated and coherent whole that focuses on real world system problems.
I'm an academic and were encouraged to do transdisciplinary research across disciplines, working with stakeholders and communities.
You cannot have a successful restoration outcome if the people living on the land are not involved.
It is a transdisciplinary space and lots of innovation can be made through a learning by doing approach.
Then we have at generation restoration, the UN Decade on ecosystem ation.
All of this is helping to fundraise for restoration activities locally and globally.
It's very important for us to celebrate our restoration successes.
By celebrating these successes, we ignite hope and inspire the next generation of thinkers and change makers.
We can see through this a brighter future for our marine ecosystems through training, new awards of scientists, managers working together in multdisciplinary teams.
Then my final message is that it's important to communicate that restoration is secondary to retaining intact ecosystems.
We need to protect what we have as well as restore.
Also important to communicate that restoration is possible.
This is communicating the successes and that it is the responsibility of everyone because removing just a single pressure is the first step on the restoration continuum.
Thank you and thank you to my various funders and my past and present students.
I would like to ask the Secretary to pass on our thanks for the presentation.
Now, I wish to give the floor to Essex and last panelist for this afternoon, Mark J Fermi, Scientific Director, Professor, Tropical Marine Ecology, Carmi Foundation, University of Amsterdam.
The presentation is entitled Missing Conservation Goals, why Standards on needed to guide Caribbean reef conservation.
You have the floor, sir.
Thank you.
Good afternoon.
What I want to talk about is a little bit differently over what we've heard so far and this is coming from a background where I work in academia for half the time through the University of Amsterdam, but then also run a fuel station and a national parks program on Curso.
Why I think that's interesting is because both with working on Caribbean reefs, which are hallmarked as here's where everything goes wrong.
You learn something what it is to be on the forefront of these canary and coal mines, if you will, and I think maybe other systems can learn from that.
But the other thing is working in curso, it's not that academia and setting up the regulations or the frameworks either for management or creating parks in the first place.
That makes me less naive as academic.
You've seen that too.
Having done that for the last 20 years, what you see is where both academia and say policy decision making, whatever you want to call it, um, don't understand each other.
It's this misunderstanding where a lot of things go wrong, I think.
What I want to do today is use this example of Curo where people are actually very willing to do stuff to improve the management of restoration.
And maybe begin first by the perspective that they say, willing government worker on a small tropical island like Kursa would take if he or she wanted to improve their quarries on the island.
The first thing that you do because nobody wants to read these thick academic reports, you go to a fancy scientific journal or a bunch of a platform, whatever, to look what this thing you're finally interested in, like, I want to go save my reese what you should do.
Then the weird thing that you see is something like this, and this is from a high impact journal.
And these are the recommendations, we've heard that here as well, and I'm not saying that this is not what you should do.
But there's a big difference between trying to get people motivated to care about versus when they already are, go to the next step.
Then when you open up the Internet or start to looking places where you would expect it for information that could guide you, this is what you're running into.
You should become friends.
You have to fight global change, and then of course, as a small island that's impossible and the friends I already had.
So this is not what you're looking for.
In other words, you could also rephrase that whole thing like you jump in the water and whether you're worried about the Arctic coral reese or Guelp forest.
You see something like this, and at first, this is a reef in curso, this picture was taken a week ago.
If you see this, you could argue it's like this looks good enough and that's exactly the problem.
When is it that you should do something? To a nature hippie, if you will, this like, it should be 50% of coral cover, we should do something.
To a government official that also has to decide to give money to the local library, this might not be a priority.
That's what I'm trying to say.
That's what the science people don't get because they always want to study, study, study.
Whereas the real decisions like that million or whatever amount of money they have.
Is that worth investing in this or the library? Help me decide, and then you run into that sheet that slide I was shown earlier.
You run into vagueness.
What I'm trying to say, It's like you need some standard, I would argue, and it's not like, all Caribbean reefs have the same standards.
You have to have a standard that works for you.
This is spatally explicit because people have tried this and because organizations, hippies, science people, they want to have one standard.
I guess that's the definition of a standard.
It doesn't work.
You want something that actually reflects the biology in your port, which, for instance, automatically means that if you're in a place that has hurricanes, you're always going to have lower coral cover than, say, in Cursor where we're outside of hurricane zone.
So Don't compare it to take that into account, but it's very easy.
What do people do? They do what lies on the bottom of that blue panel I just showed you.
It's like, look, it's all going down, do something.
But then if you jump back in that position of this government worker that wants to do something, it's like, Okay, you convinced me because that's why I'm investigating what I want to do.
But this is not helping me.
First of all, it's so dramatic that the library is going to get the money right away because you yourself said it's going to go to zero.
Ironically, and this is again what the science people should do better.
If you look at all these predictions because these are all from the literature as well, if all these predictions were to be true, we should have no corals to begin with because all of these predictions of how corals would change through time, we should be at zero in many places around the world and we're not.
And that's because people forget that when you see this, which then people often take as like, Oh, that's corals.
They're only good at one thing and that's dying.
Look, it's going fast, it's going to zero.
But if you would look at graphs like this representing the stock market, you would like, Okay, it's going a little bad right now.
But even if the stock market goes down, it's not that all companies do bad.
This is exactly what happens on Corales two.
What you're seeing here is a net result By pitching this story like it's the glasshouse of fragile corals that are only good at dying, the science people make this such a doom and gloom story that I don't blame anybody for not putting money in there.
But then the ambition, what they're trying to do, get support for reef conservation or whatever true doom and gloom obviously doesn't work.
The other thing that goes horribly wrong here, going back to the guy that sits at his government office is, I'm convinced, I'm going to do something.
But what am I seeing here? Corals go down to why? Is that bad water quality? Is it because there's not enough fish to eat the algae way and they become overgrown? Which dow can I turn so I can improve stuff.
Then up came, well, we don't know.
It could be all of those things and then that's why we have to study more to find that out.
What I would actually argue is that there's a lot of these things that are actually known that I find that somewhat surprising that that information is not on the four page almost because it's already there.
People could actually do something when they want to.
I'm building on that a little bit because of course, natural systems are variable.
In those little graphs that you just saw, you see that a lot of the doom and gloom thinking, the quantification of a net result through time, doesn't really tell you that much what's going on.
If I were to study red fruit forests based on tree cover, everybody knows that these forests need fires to function normally.
To measure the health of the system based on tree cover would be the thing to do.
So what I'm trying to get at it like if you're not separating change from change that we cause as people versus change that's natural, you might run into all sorts of problems and then because that process based perspective on RS is always so overshadowed with all these lines that supposedly go to zero in the near future, it's pretty much making a situation where nobody actually knows what to do.
And since Corvis are at the forefront of this marine conservation crisis and there's a lot more I'm aware of that, I would warn every other system that's going to be in this position that Corvis are in right now to preempt this as soon as possible, focusing on the process, something that people can see in front of it, something that makes intuitive sense.
You still have that large group of people that understands what you're saying because you're talking about a process, not about things going down.
To early on create a army of people you're going to need to avoid that other systems will follow the same faith as Caribbean res.
Natural change, that's one thing.
There is a big problem, and this is academia, again, a little graph to make it look a little sciencey.
When we looked at coral cover around the island of Kersa this island is like 70 kilometres east to west, we thought we were going to convincingly show that if you build onshore your coral rees would be in bad state.
You plot how much of the shore is changed, developed, and then the amount of corals didn't show up.
If you would be naive show up on the island right now, try to show that coastal development impacts corals right there offshore, you wouldn't find it.
What happens, some people have taken this right away, coastal development does not in fact impact corals.
Who cares? If you had been in that same island 40 years ago, it's screamingly there.
See what I'm trying to get at, it's like there's not two things change through time, the forest fire, if you will.
But there is also this academic version of if you study certain things at one point in time, like what happened around Curso 50 years ago, you would clearly see that coastal development had an effect on Corby's right off shore.
Right now, people study the same thing and they are like, no.
You don't find it anymore at all.
Those people that studied this 50 years ago are wrong.
And now you get a complete different dynamic because, you see that what we think is happening to a reef, coastal development, that now people start saying that doesn't matter anymore.
Here in lies the danger of how we as people that don't understand these systems as well as say the forest that was on fire, start to deal with this.
What you're seeing here is what people talk about restorvation wise for marine systems in general.
Early on, it was that things like overfishing and habitat destruction were the main factors.
I didn't put global change in here for obvious reasons, but more local things you can do.
Overfishing and habitat destruction were the two things that people talked about.
U, and this is what I'm trying to get at with that perspective.
If that's what's true, but then the world changes to the degree that you no longer think that coastal development matters, you're going to think of something else.
Then because people want to do something all the time, you see that there's more proactive approaches to nature decline that are becoming more fashionable and we're forgetting about the core ecological dynamics of the systems we work on, things that have to do with, say, habitat destruction and overfishing.
And then weirdly enough, and this is something that in fishing has been described as a shifting baseline.
But there almost seems to be a process based version of it where we think the whole world is shaped by different processes than what they really are.
It's processes that we can control and what it used to be, like for instance, overfishing, what are you going to do about it? Let's not talk about anymore.
In short, like what I'm trying to say is overfishing was always mentioned as a driver contributing to the decline of Caribbean reefs and it's getting out of fashion nowadays, which I find terrifying, especially because it's becoming replaced by the restoration.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, you can see that on a small little island where the costs of restoring a hectar of corn reef would be the equivalent of the money available to restore or maintain all the roads on the island, it's not going to happen.
That's what the hippies the researchers, hippies, whatever don't get.
It's like there is a price to this.
It's the same thing when people talk to about stakeholder engagement.
Has organized crime ever showed up on a stakeholder meeting? Not really.
Is it them that have something to say in whether things get developed or not? Quite often, yes.
So you see what I'm trying to get at.
It's like, here's what's really happening.
Yeah, it's nice to wish for bright skies and wreaths that are restored on the whole island.
But if there's only one big bag of money that people, including the library also compete for, it's going to be hard to make the case that people actually should do something or government people.
Also because you're losing the competition of the connection with the intuition of people living on your island.
What I mean by that, you can talk to the most all wild rough fishermen on the world, but they will always deep in their little soul, know that it was better back in the day than it is right now.
In other words, if I talk about overfishing, I have a connection with them.
If I have to say that I have to grow genetically modified fish or whatever, assist evolution, go restore, that man or woman is going to think, what the hell are you talking about? That is the big danger that I see happening on islands like this is that people that you disagree with Maybe in format.
That's actually a cursor why we stopped giving science talks altogether.
It's better to talk about fish in general, find out that you have a shared passion, whether you're a science or a fishm and leave the scientific debate somewhere else, intuitively working from this notion that everybody knows is there that there's less fish than there were.
Storm show up, the billionaires put their boats in the mangroves.
Do I really have to go tell them that mangroves are important for? That's what I mean.
This is not like that everywhere.
But what you see happening, it's very hard that people that are convinced where you're a government person that actually wants to do something, a fisherman that knows your reefs are overfished, the billionaire that puts his yacht in the mangroves because he knows it works against, what do you do? Point.
Was that a secret sign? What do you do? You have all these options and we talked about it a little bit, and then the things like you cannot change as a small little island in the Caribbean or any island for that matter.
There's the feel good exercises.
Somebody that claims that paper straws are going to save sea turtles wherever.
Good for you and for awareness purposes, it's probably amazing, but it's not going to say, sea cereals is the problem.
Saying that, of course, it is not the problem.
The problem is that somebody that wants to save a marine ecosystem at the other level, is going to give this person 5,000 bucks to buy all the papers Ros he wants, and then say, we're doing reef restoration or sea turtle protection or whatever.
I call it that.
Then when it doesn't work, it's like, we tried.
These people said that they were, and that's what the biology crowd, the NGO should be careful for to not give that excuse to a lot of people so they can say they did something.
What I'm trying to say is if you look at all the options that you're seeing around you, there's a lot of them.
But some of them are simply impossible for again, small islands like Kurson.
You cannot change the world and that's global change, obviously, but that would also be, you can fish sargassum out of the ocean at scale, like we have fleets and we did that with tuna.
I don't get it why that wouldn't be possible with algae.
That's possible.
You're not going to do that as a small island.
There's things that are too small, the paper straws, sunscreen, that sort of thing.
It's ineffective.
It's a feel good exercise that should be avoided and people shouldn't bite or provide it even to people so they can use it as an excuse and say we do conservation and then have paper straws be the end of it.
Then there's things that are simply too expensive.
Restoration, like I said, if the costs associated with restoring a hector of reef are the same as your annual road budget, it's not going to happen.
That means that there are some things and thank God they often lie in that intuitive realm of things that actually will be doable and depending on your local conditions, be a right solution for your island or nation but they require, again, that perspective going back to that initial picture where you saw that reef.
Because does that reef need any of these solutions? It depends on who you ask for.
It would be nicer if there was some number on it and these numbers exist.
But they're not enforced.
This is what I'm seeing as could be a role for, say what happens in this building is when science and say local governments fight.
It's like, no, no, it should be 20, no, it will be interesting if some higher entity would step in and it's like, here's what you could work.
And then why don't we start putting numbers in the ground? It's adaptive management.
It's like let's start first and then see where it ends.
Let's conveniently ignore certain things, but at least the strain is going.
We're not having the same conversation over and over and over again that we have to sit together, stakeholder, engage and things like that.
Because that becomes like a Same story over and over.
It's actually funny because I took that blue graph of what people recommend to do.
I actually took a lot of the UN reports too for the last 30 years, put them in the plagiarism scanner that we have at the University of Amsterdam.
Then you see that the message of what is coming out it's the same message pretty much by 80% over ten year periods.
That is not like coom.
This is what you get.
This is another version of it.
Back to the desk of the government employee that wants to do something.
There is a lot because Googling would obviously be the other way to find out.
You Google like, give me Help Networkx for Caribbean and whatever way you Google, you always get something like this, 1,000 ways to measure it to make that line going to zero, but not much information, if at all, on what to do.
Then it's important to realize and then I'm almost done that there's more of these fundamental things you have to keep in mind because science is almost reverse conservation.
We study what happens if you overfish.
We study algal growth if you add nutrients to the water.
That's exactly what you don't want if you want to restore something.
Has anybody ever taken nutrients out of the water? We know that if you manage your fish, they will come back and that it works.
But overall, for coral reef stuff, especially, all these ideas of like, hey, here's what we should do is based on the assumption that if you reverse what killed it, it will actually grow back.
That's to be for ecological theory that I will not bore you with, not necessarily true.
In other words, why haven't we set apart big areas, put a fence around it.
But instead of putting a fence around something and say, hey, if you keep the fish out, look, the stuff that they eat, seagrass in this case will grow, surprising.
But they put the fish in the cage and show that like, hey, if we bring back fish, do an enclosure experiment, if you will.
If we put the fish in there, your grass will go away, you see all these benefits that we're expecting are indeed there.
The other thing is that when people do these sign things, they do it at one side, it doesn't scale.
In addition to science being an entity that should be connected to policy, but also to the wider societal context and not from the stakeholder perspective, but more of what's possible financially, socio economically, if you will.
That science and restoration have that inherent difference that conservation is not necessarily automatically going to happen if you reverse what people studied science wise, but you have to kill a system, add nutrients, overfish, things like that.
Lastly, there's a scale thing.
What you see here is little balls that are being released.
The island again, is 70 kilometers long.
Within a day of being released, whether that's like coral propagules or sewage, it's around the whole island.
You see what I'm trying to get at this scale that we normally think about a little plot here.
What happens on this island where the north of the island is barely developed has a lot to do with what happens 50 kilometres of current.
This is not a reason why, for instance, that direct link and that's how people study stuff like coastal development or reef should be in dismal state, how that often doesn't work, but that's also why it sometimes does because there's busy areas on Kura reef are actually better because clean water is being brought in too for the same reason.
But space space in conservation land is on a much bigger scale, which would then go call for a bigger perspective to study the ecology of these reefs to beyond the side scale that's typical for science studies.
So what I would advocate for is some sort of system where instead of having these sort of independent stories where people we just did this in curso.
Actually, there's a lot of studies done on the island rather than expect government people to jump in bed and then right before they fall asleep, read 50 studies because they care so much, which they do, but it's again, not going to happen.
So we took that IPCC perspective, we're just going to summarize everything, make it a ten page so anybody who cares can.
But that seems to be working on cursor, but it should be happening here as well because the amount of basic information that's being shared here right now in a place where you would hope that people are more like, we're convinced, what can we do? What should we do? That should be more on the forefront than discussing the basics of biology that we've heard yesterday and today at some point.
So what I again, advocate for is a sort of IPCC perspective where say everybody on the table a month beforehand or a month because it wouldn't take that much compiles what's actually worth to know, focuses on the processes to study that say, an organization like the UN could use this to sort of in the bigger dynamic, so to speak, to influence these islands like Curs Should we do it? Yeah, you should because look, here's how we weave it into, all other socioeconomic factors you can think about.
To conclude, it's like be careful.
I'm saying this foremost to the biology people.
It's cool that you care, but paper swaths are not going to do it.
At the same time, you actually make it worse because people that don't want to do something, you give them the excuse to not do anything.
At the same time, government should be aware of this and really focus on these things that actually mattered or have mattered in the past.
Then things like overfishing habitat destruction, somebody that breaks down a reef chops down mangroves or has lived on the island for 40 years.
We all hate the person that took down the mangroves.
We all know that there's less fish.
It's important to stick in that realm before you start to replace, or you have to know the ins and outs of DNA before we can talk about your system because we're talking about system evolution.
Makes no sense.
Separate the whole natural fluctuation of things versus what we call an focus on a process based understanding because the process you can change, if you only worry about the outcome, you don't know which to turn in this co machine.
Again, a lot of that information is already available.
Consider the IPCC and then say things like this.
I'm again, speaking for Caribbean Reef only, but I've worked in the Pacific quite a bit too and it probably is the same.
But in the end, it is about doing something.
Right now, I often find that we forget that the missionary perspective on you should care about your marine system, whatever it is, still is too much on, you should care about it.
There's a lot of people they care about and if you don't care about now, you're probably never going to care about in the first place.
It's really important to go from caring to, let's go do something.
Then there's a lot of people that for the first time ever will tread in the water and it would be nice if there was clarity and that could come from, say, here where you're going to be fine.
We got you when you're going to go there and the inclusion of standards so people don't have to argue all the time, what is a healthy or unhealthy beef.
There's going to be a lot of good stuff there too.
It's like, don't worry about your reef.
It's all fine, so you don't have to do anything so the money can actually go to the library would be beneficial as well.
28 minutes, perfect.
Thank you.
I'd like to thank Professor Vermch for his presentation, and we have now heard the sixth and last panelists for this afternoon.
So we will open the floor for questions and comments.
Okay.
I think there is no.
Okay.
Okay.
So we have requests for the floor from panelists.
I would ask you to introduce yourself we don't have your name here.
Good afternoon.
Thanks for a lovely set of talks this afternoon for all the panelists.
I'm Elizabeth Sinclair, a scientist from University of Western Australia.
Just a comment really and perhaps the last speaker could address it.
There are a number of standards being developed for restoration science and I'm just wondering how we actually come up with those standards for actions if we're not incorporating the science.
Um, mostly they would just come from, there's a lot of what would you call it gray literature.
People that have tried things that by doing found out, that would be one big source.
There's actually a lot of when things started to go wrong early on, people talked about this, wrote a book about it, but then nobody knows that book exists.
What I'm trying to say is it's like these values are often quite there and they're hidden.
For Cries, I know I find them for Caribbean quarries.
It doesn't matter even because the coral cover in the Caribbean, it's 40-0% with a lot 10-15.
Whether you pick 11 or 14, it almost doesn't matter.
It's more to set something that serves as a spark to actually start doing rather than should this be 11.4 or 11.6, I think.
I almost think it doesn't really matter as long as you start measuring at some point whether your own project works or not, and then against that background, see if your intervention works.
Again, report back and please do this.
That's actually where a lot of information to It's like all the projects that are failing.
If we have more insight on that, you could make a pretty good guess on you have to do bigger or longer.
It's an academic exercise, so I'm not going to put a number on it here, but it's doable.
Let's put it that way.
Thank you.
Okay.
Hi.
Something about standards that I'd like to talk is in R Janeiro where we are doing this restorations, there is a a lot from the state about how we should do, it's actually about re dating, not exactly restorating.
But I think that the one about mangroves are a bit based on inland forests like a copy and what is actually happening, it's bad standards for mangrove and we are obliged to plant more trees than we should.
When you see past restoration places, you'd have like trees dying to open more space should get to the equilibrium point of the forest.
It's crazy that we are monitoring like 2013, 2017, and 2021 restorations and you see more carbon accumulation, and then the restoration would like there's too much competition for space and some trees will die, and then the forest would achieve the equilibrium and would get close to the conservative areas.
Sometimes we have standards and they are not well made and this becomes a problem.
We are trying to talk to the government and the NGO that works with us that has been doing this for longer in the region are trying to talk to them because we have a standard that doesn't make sense for mangrove and it's more complicated for the forest to get to the equilibrium.
And they were trying to do a good thing, but they ended up doing a not very good thing.
That's something I would talk about when you say standards, and this is very complicated.
All right.
Since there is no other request for the floor, now close the meeting and before I do that, let me remind you that we will begin tomorrow morning with segment two, enabling and enhancing marine ecosystem restoration through international cooperation and coordination, challenges and opportunities.
My co chair and I would like to thank you once again for your presence and thank our panelists for their presentations.
Let us in the usual manner, thank our distinguished panelists for this afternoon.
The meeting is adjourned until tomorrow morning.