By The Reef-World Foundation
All divers can relate to those terrifying moments underwater during the first few years of their diving careers, feeling helpless and completely out of control. Some of the most popular stories involve strong currents, an unexpected attack from a frisky Triggerfish or feeling that overwhelming sensation of facing the edge of a continental plate. Less often but equally disastrous, human errors can create dramatic situations. Let’s paint a situation here: you are in a tropical island on a diving trip, as you and your buddies get ready, your dive guide indicates that you are going to be descending along the anchor line. You are a new diver, so you follow their lead and do as told. As the group is halfway through the descent, it just so happens that the anchor is pulled up by the boat crew, missing you and your buddies by inches. Luckily there are no human casualties, but just after you feel the wash of water and bubbles hit your mask and manage to take some very deep breaths to calm down, you look down and see that this was not a near-miss. There are casualties. They just aren’t human.
What has been your scariest moment underwater? Credit: Sunphol Photography
Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon situation, we are all aware of the variation in the quality of diving services across all parts of the world. And where safety standards fail, environmental standards tend to fail as well. The amount of damage from a small boat anchor can be quite devastating, it can destroy decades of coral growth.
Research forecasts that the damage caused by anchors and their chains can impact an average of 7.11% of coral at a frequently used site each year1. That doesn’t take many years to destroy a dive site. Damage occurs in the form of physical breakage, scratches, dislodgement and pulverizing the substrate. Hard corals are obvious victims, but studies show that soft coral cover is also lower at high anchoring intensity sites2. The quality of the coral reef as a habitat, it’s structural complexity, is grossly impacted by anchoring3, meaning it houses fewer numbers and species all leading to a degraded aesthetic value of the reef for tourists, poorer fisheries and reduced coastal protection. Furthermore, a reef subject to these kinds of stressors will be less resilient to the larger scale changes from a warmer, more acidic ocean and may lead to more intense and frequent bleaching events.
Hard corals are obvious victims of anchors, but studies show that soft coral cover is also lower at high anchoring intensity sites. Credit: Bo Mancao
Luckily there are several more environmentally friendly alternatives available depending on every specific situation. The Green Fins initiative has been working with the diving industry to achieve best environmental practices since 2004, and the one common link the teams have found between different diving locations is that there is no one answer:
In the case that any of the buoy lines go missing (cut by fishermen or broken), dive shops around the island are usually very quick in response by attaching a new one using any materials they have from their dive shop to reestablish the buoy line within days.” – Peisee Hwang, Bubbles Dive Resort, Green Fins Top 10 Member in Malaysia Credit: The Reef-World Foundation
“We activated our diver community in Jakarta, and some donated the money to buy the mooring lines and buoys. On one of our day trips, we got a few divers together and got the mooring done.” – Leon Boey, Living Seas, Green Fins member Indonesia
One thing that has worked across all locations is collaboration. Between dive shops, government, and community. It isn’t easy to lobby the government or navigate the social and political relationships between businesses. However, it’s worth considering the return on investment here. Nature and Adventure-based Tourism may outperform Mass Tourism by an average of 60-65% by 2035 in the Coral Triangle alone4. As this sector within tourism grows, maintaining a variety of healthy, diverse reef dive sites becomes a worthwhile investment.
There are many issues impacting reefs and certainly there are far bigger threats to reefs than running a dive shop, but by reducing the impacts you have control over, you are likely leaving reefs stronger to face those global threats.5
“We have tried to start a dive shop “adopt a dive site” system to ensure moorings are in place at all dive sites. So each shop is responsible for caring for moorings at two dive sites. Sharing responsibility like this seems to work well on our island.” – Matt Reed, Evolution Dive Centre, Green Fins Top 10 Member in The Philippines.
This year is the third International Year of the Reef (IYOR), this special designation gives the opportunity to reach out and form new partnerships with governments, businesses and communities who are looking to celebrate. On the Green Fins Alternatives to Anchoring How-To-Video you can find some inspiration for different solutions, such as mooring to a pier, drifting, install permanent mooring lines on the beach, amongst others. Be a driver of change, can you do something in your community to implement any of these practices?
Alternatives to Anchoring is the second Action Point of the Green Fins IYOR 2018 social media campaign. This campaign aims to support divers and dive businesses to take further action by sharing and providing solutions to some of the biggest threats. The campaign will serve as a platform to inspire action and change in others by sharing the stories of success gathered by more than 10 years of working with the industry. By doing so we will be saving coral reefs from mass extinction and the livelihoods of the more than 200 million people who depend on healthy and balanced coral reef ecosystems.6
Follow the campaign on Green Fins social media! A brand new #AlternativesToAnchoring infographic will be released with lots of new and inspiring information to instigate action!
For more information on the International Year of the Reef 2018 follow this link.
Want to be part of the movement? Share. Print. Post. Hashtag: https://trello.com/b/fEeL9QWv
Green Fins is a UN Environment initiative internationally coordinated by The Reef-World Foundation.
References:
- Saphier et al (2005
- Dinsdale et al (2004)
- Giglio et al. (2017)
- Investing in Nature and Adventure Based Tourism vs. Mass Tourism in the Coral Triangle. WWF, May 2017.
- Beeden et al. (2014)
- http://coral.unep.ch/Coral_Reefs.html