Measuring healthy reefs

TheStarOnline: Measuring healthy reefs
Volunteers take a dive to keep an eye on our marine wonderland.

IT is a clear night out on a beach in Pulau Tioman, Pahang. The stars are out and a party is underway – and it’s filled with volunteers from audit firm KPMG celebrating their completion of a three-day intensive EcoDiver course and Reef Check survey.

Yes, coral reefs around the world are dying but the group of diving enthusiasts from KPMG are not sitting around lamenting – they are doing something about it. Trained as EcoDivers, they are capable of conducting underwater surveys to assess the health of corals reefs.

They adopted the reef off Pulau Soyak, an island within the Tioman Archipelago, five years ago and send about six divers out every year. However, this year, new recruits bumped the number up to 12 divers, so they could adopt Pulau Renggis reef onto the survey list as well.

Grace Loh, 42, an advisory department manager at KPMG, has been coming to Tioman since the surveys started in 2007.

“I’d learned how to dive with my husband the year before, so I thought it would be nice to join the CSR project when it came up,” she said. When she first started diving, all Loh saw was fish. “Lots of colour, lots of shapes and lots of fishes. The novelty wears off quite quickly. But taking the EcoDiver course is educational … realising that something you’ve spotted is actually incredibly rare becomes a real buzz!”

One detects a real sense of pride about what KPMG is doing with Reef Check Malaysia in her voice. This is the fifth year the company is working with the non-profit that endeavours to protect Malaysia’s endangered coral reefs.

Through corporate sponsorships, Reef Check has built up an army of volunteers to conduct regular surveys of reefs all over the country. General manager Julian Hyde says to date, some 300 divers have gained EcoDiver certification. Many volunteers are supplied through sponsorship programmes from companies as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) projects. The corporates sponsor up to 70% of the RM750 EcoDiver course for each employee (who has to have an Open Water Diver certificate) and organise a team of people to go on yearly Reef Check survey expeditions on “adopted” reefs.

In the recent survey of Tioman reefs, scuba divers from KPMG, deployed in twos, swam along transect lines laid out under water. The first pair noted down substrate cover such as hard coral, soft coral, nutrient indicator algae, rock, sand or recently killed coral. The second pair counted the number of indicator invertebrates (such as crown of thorn starfish and sea cucumbers) and signs of impact, whilst the third pair arguably had the most challenging task – counting the number of indicator fishes as they swam around.

Reef Check was started in 1996 by marine ecologist Dr Gregor Hodgson and arrived in Malaysia in 2001. It grew out of an idea to create a global army of volunteers trained in the same set of data collection methods to conduct reef surveys. Up until the organisation’s first global survey of coral reef health in 1997, there had never been a concerted effort, just pockets of research using individual methods of data collection. The results of that survey were shocking scientific confirmation that coral reefs were undergoing alarming levels of decimation due to over-fishing, illegal fishing and pollution.

Each of Reek Check’s national coordinating bodies have since been monitoring the impacts that different enforcement measures make, so we can build up a picture of how best to protect our reefs. Most people in Malaysia will be happy to know that our reefs are faring pretty well. Data collected by Reef Check Malaysia for example indicates that most of the reefs gazetted as Marine Parks have remained in relatively stable conditions since gazettement.

If you dreamed of being a marine biologist as a kid but got told that being a lawyer would be more practical, this is your chance to live the dream. All you need to do is be a qualified diver. Reef Check’s methods of data collection were designed by scientists specifically for use by non-scientists. You can enrol for a three-day course to get certification as an EcoDiver, after which you can participate in Reef Check surveys anywhere in the world. The certification will equip you with the ability to gather data on 16 global and eight regional indicator organisms, which have been selected as specific measures of human impacts on coral reefs based on their economic and ecological value, and sensitivity to human impacts.

Reef Check Malaysia’s ultimate role is getting more people trained, so more surveys get done, so we have a better picture of the state of our reefs. The data is eventually turned into a report which is shared with the Department of Marine Parks Malaysia. The ultimate goal is to build a relationship with academia and the department, to the point where they can coordinate their data collection, academic research and enforcement efforts to do something about reefs that are not faring well.

Start them young

After five years of partnership with Reef Check, one can see a sense of ownership growing around the project among the KPMG staff. You can tell some of the veteran volunteers take what they’re doing really seriously.

In 2009, Lim Jit Cheng, an executive director in the restructuring and advisory department, came on board and took charge of the EcoDiver CSR project. He also spearheaded an initiative to bring students of SK Taman Tun Dr Ismail 2 in Kuala Lumpur, a school KPMG does monthly recycling projects with, onboard. So during the recent trip to Tioman, 25 excitable Year Five kids camped out on the grass lawn in front of the Tioman Marine Park Centre.

Hyde had wanted to bring an urban school to the island to learn about coral reefs for a while, as Reef Check’s Rainforest To Reef school programme had previously involved schools from the islands and nearby mainland. Lim pointed out that both programmes sponsored by KPMG (the EcoDivers and the schoolkids’ project) are conservation related; one is data collection which can be used for research on our reefs, the other is about investing in the future through educating children. In the Rainforest to Reef camp, the children learnt about four major ecosystems – rainforest, mangroves, reefs and seagrasses – and why they are important and worth protecting.

On Day two of the camp, up the stairs of the Tioman Marine Park Centre just past the interactive info-kiosks and life-size replicas of turtles and sharks, this year’s batch of students huddled in silence. In the darkened air-conditioned auditorium, marine parks officer Mohd Azizol pointed at images of tropical fishes and nudibranches, slugs with colourful elaborate fan-like appendages, which flicker on the projector screen.

“What you’re looking at here are some of the rarest things on earth,” he said. “You can find them on the Discovery channel and on programmes like National Geographic, but you know what kids? Because you live in this special country called Malaysia, all you need to do to see them is hop on the train, get on a boat and they’re right there. Tourists come hundreds of miles just to see them, bringing in billions of ringgit for the tourism industry, so we should look after our assets.”

He explained what “eco-tourism” meant, adding that sustainable management of reefs coupled with responsible tourism practices can act as a buffer and alternative income source for locals who might otherwise seek income through destructive practices such as dynamite fishing.

The session was educational and the kids sat quietly through it all, open-mouthed and listening attentively.

When the time came for everyone to don orange life jackets and jump in the water, chances are all the orange shapes bobbing up and down in close proximity to their teachers and KPMG minders knew what they were looking at. Hopefully, these kids will grow up appreciative and mindful of, the underwater realm.

For more on being an EcoDiver, go to reefcheck.org.my.