The race to protect Barbados’ coral reef has reached a make-or-break moment, with 90 per cent of the island’s coral polyps either ill, destroyed or stressed.
According to head of the Regional Secretariat for the Inter-governmental Oceanographic Commission-UNESCO, Dr Lorna Inniss, should this course continue, the country’s underwater ecosystem could be left with less than five per cent viable coral reef by 2030.
“That means that by the time your grandchildren come along, there may not be any living coral reefs. That’s a serious thing. But it can be reversed. It can be if we do the right thing,” she added.
Coral reefs are home to 25 per cent of all marine life, accounting for millions of fish and other species that find shelter and food among the coral. The reefs are also vital for the protection of coastlines from storms and waves that can cause flooding and erosion.
Inniss said the impact of the coral reef deterioration could already be identified here in the spread of Sargassum seaweed across the island’s coastline.
She was speaking during yesterday’s student engagement session on the Caribbean Hurricane Ocean Glider field experiment, held at the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology in Husbands, St James.
She said the matter had become a global issue with 80 per cent of the world’s reefs affected by rising temperatures which, in turn, placed greater emphasis on climate initiatives to help preserve the marine ecosystem.
“When you see the electric bus fleet in Barbados, we don’t think of coral reefs. However, every little bit that is put together around the world to reduce the acceleration of global temperature benefits coral reefs.
“Corals take one to 300 years to get to a particular size. They grow very slowly and the problem is that they are very sensitive to temperature changes. There’s only five to ten degrees in any direction that they can be healthy. The sea surface temperature in Barbados extends way beyond that, especially in the summer.
“That is a stressor on the corals and they’re much more susceptible to coral diseases and to death. Every summer, when the sea surface temperature goes up, the corals are stressed again,” she added.
Efforts to restore the reef are under way in a project funded by the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), led by the Coastal Zone Management Unit and Roots To Reef.
CDB operations manager Antonio Rowe said the project involved micro-coral fragmentation, which is a technique used in coral reef restoration to accelerate the growth of coral colonies by cutting them into very small pieces.
He noted, however, that the sustainability of the procedure required a healthy environment where corals could exist, stressing that trying to restore corals in a poor environment was not beneficial. (JRN)