Bertarelli Summer2024 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 27
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completely untouched. Some great scientists
from Environmental Systems Ltd, who are
based in Wales, along with Anguilla National
Trust, and local scientists started looking at
Anguilla and trying to understand why some
bits of the island were destroyed while others
weren’t. They showed that there was a clear,
positive impact of forests, mangroves, wetlands, seagrass beds, and coral reefs, on the
infrastructure.
Using that model, they started to trace
where could be restored to help prevent damage or disaster the next time a hurricane comes.
I started sitting in meetings with the Red Cross,
with disaster management committees, and
with hotels to talk about the need to restore
those natural boundaries. We all recognized
that we need to restore the forests, we need to
plant. It’s no longer just a batty conservationist like me saying we need to save the parrots
and iguanas or we need to make a nicer environment for tourists. This is our defense. It’s a
more practical, affordable, living, and beneficial guard against hurricanes than just building sea walls and other hurricane infrastructure instead.
Ultimately, the conversation around conservation on these island communities is starting
to change. I am a herpetologist, but I’m starting
to understand the values of these ecosystems
for people as well.
RE W I L D I NG
intense. Corals are already living at the edge
of their thermal tolerance. So when it gets too
hot, they lose all their color and bleach and die.
We’re already locked in—even if we do something about climate change right now—to a
few more degrees of heating. So we really need
these more local solutions to help coral reefs
survive in the meantime.
So through our work, we’ve been able to
see what benefits seabirds specifically can have
for reefs to help them withstand these effects
of climate change and become more resilient
systems as we continue to deal with the other
big issues. Our work has shown that where
there are seabirds we see corals grow twice
as fast than around islands where there’s no
seabirds because of the invasive rats and the
coconut plantations. And because of this, the
reefs recover faster. So in the Indian Ocean,
the reefs were wiped out in 2015 and 2016 by a
big bleaching event. And in less than four years,
coral cover has completely recovered. And
again, this was way faster around the islands
with seabirds than those with rats.
This shows that these local, nature-based
solutions can make a big difference, to not only
promote healthy coral reefs, but then this can
also feed back to the islands as well. Where
you have healthy coral cover, the islands might
be more able to withstand things like storm
surges and sea level rise, which are also becoming more intense as climate change continues.
These connections are even more important in
the face of climate change.
Casey, when you hear stories about these
islands and seabirds and the changing climate,
what is your perspective as a marine ecologist
who studies life underwater?
Casey Benkwitt: I’ve been studying coral reefs
for more than 10 years now, and almost every
coral reef ecologist will tell you the biggest
threat is climate change. No one will say it’s
terrestrial, invasive species that are a threat to
reefs. But through our research, we see that what
happens on land does make a big difference.
Coral reefs are threatened by climate
change and they’re threatened by these marine
heat waves that are getting more and more
We’re building on traditional and cultural
knowledge of these connections that perhaps
western science has to relearn. What was your
“aha” moment, the moment when you suddenly saw things differently?
Carr: It took me three goes to have that
“eureka” moment. The first one was in 1996. I
was fortunate enough as a Royal Marine commando to be sent to one of the atolls in the
Chagos Archipelago, Diego Garcia to do some
work. I sat on the end of a place called the short
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