On a boat off the coast on an island near Abu Dhabi, Marine Scientist Hamad- Al Jilani feels the corals, picks them from the reef nursery, packed in a box of seawater, and studies them carefully, making sure that they have not yet been lost their color.
The corals were bleached once, and now they are big, healthy, and ready to be moved back to their original reefs with a hoot that they will thrive again.
Jilani, a part of the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi’s coral restoration program, said, ” We try to grow tiny fragments up to, and now some of them have reached the size of my fist.”
The nursery provides corals with the ideal conditions to recover: clear waters with strong currents and the right amount of sunlight. Al – Jilani periodically checks the growth of corals, removes any potentially harmful seaweed and seagrass, and lets the fish feed off the corals to clean them until they are healthy enough to be relocated.
Coral bleaching occurs when sea temperatures rise, and the sun glares clear away algae that give the corals color, making them white. Corals can survive bleaching events but can’t effectively support marine life, threatening the populations that depend on them.
According to EAD 2017, the UAE lost up to 70% of its corals, particularly around Abu Dhabi, when water temperatures reached 37 degrees celsius. But Al Jilani said 40-50 % of corals survived the second bleaching event in 2021.
Although the bleaching events wiped out a good portion of the corals, “it also proved that the corals are resilient, and these corals can withstand these kinds of conditions.”
How to limit global warming and its effects will be discussed at length at the United Nations climate conference, which will be held in Dubai later this year.
But according to the UN Environment Programme, bleaching due to warming weather is not the only threat to coral reefs around the gulf. High oil tankers, fossil fuel reaction activities, offshore installations, and the exploitation of marine resources are all putting marine life under stress.
Moreover, Environmentalists have also criticized the UAE and Dubai for their large-scale buildings and huge coastal developments.
Furthermore, John Henrik Stahl, the dean of the College of Marine Sciences at Khorfakkan University in Sharjah, states, ” More than 90 million cubic meters of sediments were dredged and dropped on top of one of the remaining reefs near Dubai.”
Members of Dubai’s diving community are also encouraging coral protection efforts.
Diving course director Amr Anwar is in the process of creating a certified coral restoration course that teaches divers how to collect and replant corals that have fallen after being knocked off by the divers fins or a boat’s anchor.
Anwar stated, “I don’t want people to see broken corals and just leave them like that. Through training we give people, they could take these broken corals that they find and plant them elsewhere, and then see them grow and watch their progress”.
But experts say that unless the threat of overheating seas caused by climate change is solved, viral bleaching events will continue, damaging reefs worldwide.
Stahl, the Khorfakkan University scientist, stated, ” You have to make sure that the cause for the degradation of the coral reefs in the first place is no longer a threat. Otherwise, the restoration effort may be for nothing.”
