Minutes away from the Kenyan mainland, the densely forested island of Wasini is one of several starting lines for coral reef restoration efforts in the western Indian Ocean.
On a rare calm day during the normally turbulent monsoon season, four divers — carrying measuring equipment, shoes and toothbrushes — descended in turns to the sea-bed reef restoration site on the Shimoni Channel.
“We use coral fragments collected from wild populations to establish the nurseries,” diver Yatin Patel said, before slipping into the turquoise waters. “After growing, they’re taken to the coral garden.”
Photo: AP
Patel and his team, who are part of REEFolution, clean the coral nurseries and measure the sizes of the growing corals, which are supported by plastic pipes and pyramid-structured steel nets.
Since 2012, the foundation and the island community have together planted more than 8,000 corals per year and placed about 800 artificial reef structures in the channel in a bid to restore Wasini’s coral gardens.
The project is threatened by growing costs and a planned fishing port in Shimoni, only 3km farther down Kenya’s coast.
The Wasini coral restoration project is one of many dotting Africa’s western coast after a series of severe coral bleaching events due to warming ocean waters.
After a devastating year in 1998, due in large part to El Nino, huge stretches of the Indian Ocean’s corals — from Somalia to South Africa — were badly affected.
Coral bleaching occurs when extreme temperatures and sun glare trigger corals to flush out algae, causing them to turn white.
Corals can survive bleaching events, but are under greater stress and cannot effectively support marine life, threatening the populations that depend on them.
Tim McClanahan, a senior conservation zoologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that 1998 was not the first such event — there was one in 1983 and since then, there have been three in the past two decades: in 2005, 2010 and 2016.
Many of these bleaching events are directly linked to climate change, McClanahan said.
The Wasini coral restoration project, which started in 2012, followed in the footsteps of Nature Seychelles, a nongovernmental organization that initiated the first coral replanting exercise in the western Indian Ocean. A similar project was undertaken in Tanzania.
However, Wasini’s corals are in particularly bad shape, he said.
“There are some areas in Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar that are in better condition. We are working to protect those reefs,” he said.
Protection programs are much more successful than those that aim to restore badly bleached corals, he added.
“We found it expensive and also over the long term, many of the corals we planted died,” he said of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s coral restoration attempts.
“The restoration efforts will not solve this big-scale problem,” he added.
The Wasini project is threatened by the proposed construction of a deep-sea fisheries port in Shimoni.
The port is one of the key pledges that the Kenyan government made at the first UN ocean summit in Nairobi in 2018.
The environmental impact assessment report says that construction of the port would undermine corals, fish and other marine organisms due to the massive plumes that are to be generated through dredging.
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