On a boat off the coast of an island near Abu Dhabi, marine scientist Hamad al-Jailani feels the corals, picked from the reef nursery and packed in a box of seawater, and studies them carefully, making sure they have not lost their color.
The corals were once bleached. Now they are big, healthy and ready to be moved back to their original reefs in the hope that they will thrive once more.
“We try to grow them from very small fragments up to — now some of them have reached — the size of my fist,” said al-Jailani, who is a member of Environment Agency Abu Dhabi’s (EAD) coral restoration program.
Photo: AP
The nursery gives corals the ideal conditions to recover: clear waters with strong currents and the right amount of sunlight.
Al-Jailani periodically checks the corals’ growth, removes any potentially harmful seaweed and seagrass, and even lets the fish feed off the corals to clean them, until they are healthy enough to be relocated.
The EAD has been rehabilitating and restoring corals since 2021, when reefs off the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) coast faced their second bleaching event in just five years.
EAD’s project is one of many initiatives — public and private — across the country to protect the reefs and marine life that depend on them, in a nation that has come under fire for its large-scale developments and polluting industries that cause harm to underwater ecosystems.
There has been some progress, but experts remain concerned for the future of the reefs in a warming world.
Coral bleaching occurs when sea temperatures rise and sun glares flush out algae that give the corals their color, turning them white. Corals can survive bleaching events, but cannot effectively support marine life, threatening the populations that depend on them.
The UAE lost up to 70 percent of its corals, especially around Abu Dhabi, in 2017 when water temperatures reached 37°C, the EAD said.
However, al-Jailani said that 40 to 50 percent of corals survived the second bleaching event in 2021.
Although the bleaching events “did wipe out a good portion of our corals,” he said, “it did also prove that the corals that we have are actually resilient [and] can actually withstand these kind of conditions.”
Bleaching events are happening more frequently around the world as waters warm due to human-induced climate change, caused by the burning of oil, coal and gas that emit heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.
Other coral reef systems around the world have suffered mass bleaching events, most notably Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
How to limit global warming and its effects is to be discussed at length at the UN climate conference, which would be held in Dubai this year.
The UAE is one of the world’s largest oil producers and has some of the highest per capita carbon dioxide emissions globally.
The country has pledged to have net zero carbon emissions by 2050, which means all carbon dioxide emissions are either slashed or canceled out, but the goal has been met with skepticism from analysts.
However, bleaching due to warming weather is not the only threat to coral reefs around the gulf. High oil tanker traffic, fossil-fuel related activities, offshore installations and the exploitation of marine resources are putting marine life under intense stress, causing them to degrade, the UN Environment Programme said.
Environmentalists have long criticized the UAE, and Dubai in particular, for its large-scale buildings and huge coastal developments.
The building of the Palm Jebel Ali, which began more than a decade ago and has been on hold since 2008, caused an outcry among conservationists after it reportedly destroyed about 8 square kilometers of reef.
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