The town itself is synonymous with its beautiful reefs and diving in the Philippines. Although her resort drew in good business over the years, Sevilla also wanted to help preserve one of the main draws–its bountiful population of coral reefs.
Bauan’s diverse coral population has frequently suffered from natural calamities like typhoons and man-made obstructions like plastic waste and dynamite fishing–factors that could not only affect the local ecosystem, but also the tourism industry.
Hoping to boost coral numbers in the face of these environmental threats, Sevilla devised a plan to begin planting coral nurseries for damaged coral across the coast. She enlisted the help of an expert and invited interested divers to learn about coral conservation and begin work on her pet project–making a coral nursery for damaged and detached pieces of coral.
But Sevilla says the project isn’t just about finding a home for orphaned coral. She also plans to store the collected coral nurseries for the future just in case there’s a need to replenish the area’s coral population, in the face of certain environmental threats brought by climate change, such as a mass bleaching event. In 2020, parts of surrounding Batangas province suffered a mass coral bleaching event, with about 72 kilometers of its coastline affected, according to the conservationist group Reef Watch Philippines. Sevilla fears that her beautiful home of Bauan may one day suffer the same fate. She knows the nursery won’t stave off climate change, but hopes to save at least a small portion of the coral.
/”I think the goal is not to make such a huge difference, to be able to stop climate change or be able to really create a huge impact on conservation. Everything that creates influence has always started small,/” said Sevilla.
So far Sevilla and her team have only collected 64 pieces of damaged coral for the nursery, and plan to expand upon that number. Although the project stills exists in experimental form, and the actual growth rate of the saved coral is very slow (only one or two cm per year), Sevilla and her team hope to replant the rescued coral back in the wild once they have made a significant recovery, a process that could take years. They also plan to teach other conservationists to build their own coral nurseries once the project has matured.
Sam Shu Qin, a marine scientist and co-founder of a non-profit marine conservationist group Our Singapore Reefs, said establishing nurseries have several benefits, including finding out which coral species are more resilient to climate change.
/”If we select those that are actually more tolerant to climate change, to higher temperature, that can survive higher temperature, then you can actually propagate more, so next time you are actually like building a reef of the future,/” she said.
The Philippines sits at the coral triangle and home of over 600 types of corals and 2,000 species of fish, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.
According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, parts of the Philippines may experience some coral bleaching event in the next three months–part of what is likely to be declared a fourth mass global bleaching event.
The world so far has warmed by 1.2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and scientific evidence suggests the world has already reached a disastrous tipping point at which 70 to 90 percent of the world’s coral reefs are predicted to die under such warming.
(Production: Peter Blaza)
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