(gentle music)
- Functionally, coral reefs will disappear in our lifetime
if we don't take drastic measures.
That is a fact, a tragic fact.
- Finding Philippe Cousteau Jr. is no easy task.
Although typically he's deep underwater,
I was finally able to find him above ground,
being a bit of a land mammal this time.
He is in the Sierra Mountain Range
and he's on a camping trip, which was windy, remote,
and very true to form for an explorer like him.
But thanks to technology, we're able to talk.
Philippe is the grandson of Jacques Cousteau,
the man who invented scuba diving
and brought the ocean into living rooms around the world.
Philippe grew up at sea
and he's made the ocean his life's work also.
He founded Earth Echo International, which is dedicated
to building the next generation of ocean advocates.
And over the last several years,
he's turned his attention to what he calls
the most under-reported environmental crisis on the planet,
which is the collapse of coral reefs.
(dramatic music)
Welcome to "Back from the Brink"
from Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom."
I'm Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant.
- [Peter] Each episode,
we're going deep on a variety of species
and those that went to the very edge of disappearing
and the people that fought to bring them back.
Coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean's floor,
yet they support a quarter of all marine life.
Since the 1950s, we've lost half of them.
Before we get to what's being done, we need to understand
what we're losing and why almost no one is talking about it.
- For the folks who are watching this
but may not have spent time underwater,
can you just describe, first of all, what is a coral reef,
what are corals,
and then what roles do reefs play in the oceans?
- Coral reefs are critical ecosystems,
and oftentimes, people forget just how important they are.
They are arguably the most biodiverse ecosystem on Earth,
land or sea,
and they're much more than pretty fish and snorkeling.
Coral reefs are, of course,
critical to biodiversity and fish.
Tourism, they provide about two and a half trillion dollars
of goods and services a year.
They contribute tens of billions of dollars
to the global tourism industry,
tens of billions to fisheries.
Hard to estimate, but three quarters of a billion
to one billion people rely on coral reefs
for their livelihoods every year around the world.
And so when I think of coral reefs,
I think of them as infrastructure.
Now, the really sad part,
oftentimes when I'm giving talks or lectures,
I'll ask people how much of the world's rainforests
have disappeared in our lifetime?
And the answer is usually 60, 70%.
And I understand there's a lot of press and media
around the rainforests and the decline of the Amazon,
and it is terrible, but the answer is about 17 to 20%.
Yet in our lifetimes, we've lost 50% of the world's reefs.
And it's very possible
that reefs become functionally extinct in our lifetime
because of climate change and local pollution
and development and overfishing.
So coral reefs are in a much greater crisis
than land terrestrial forests and rainforests by far,
and yet most people give it a collective shrug
and the global community largely
gives it a collective shrug.
And that's a really big problem.
- I just have to jump in here
because these are statistics that folks really need to hear.
A global shrug, I mean, do you think it's...
I know that there's a lot of reasons why,
one is that there are a lot of barriers to going underwater.
So most people haven't seen a reef, touched a reef,
swam in one, looked at it with their own eyes.
But I think also the average person
isn't really familiar with coral.
So can you even describe to us what are corals
and what do they do and why do we need them to stay alive?
- A lot of people do look at coral reefs
and think of them as painted rocks, colored rocks.
In fact, coral reefs are living organisms.
Coral polyps are part plant, part animal,
a little bacteria thrown in for good measure.
They're fascinating creatures.
They build like the apartment buildings of reefs systems.
They construct little calcium carbonate homes around them.
And over millennia, they build new layer
upon layer upon layer upon layer.
So the outer layer of a reef is the only layer
that has living tissue.
Everything underneath is essentially
calcium carbonate limestone.
And in fact, it is coral reefs that have built
the Parthenon and the Washington Monument.
Old limestone predominantly comes from the ocean.
They are the critical structure builders
of coastal ecosystems, tropical coastal ecosystems,
and they are, as I said, one of the most,
if not the most biodiverse ecosystem on the planet.
25% of the world's seafood spends part of its life in
or around or dependent upon a coral reef.
So they are absolutely critical
to the global ocean ecosystem
and affect, as I said, hundreds of millions
up to a billion people's lives very directly,
from economic development and growth
and jobs to protecting coastlines from storm surge
that's getting increasingly worse.
So they look pretty,
but they provide a structural function,
almost like infrastructure that is critical
for coastal health of the ocean.
- I know that you and I believe coral reefs
are inherently valuable.
They should just exist whether they're providing services
or not, but they also do protect coastlines
where humans live from storm surges and flooding.
- Yeah, they do, and that's something,
we think about coral reefs as shields, coastal shields.
Now, coral reefs can absorb up to 97% of storm surge.
They can reduce wave height up to 84%,
and so in a world with increasingly catastrophic cyclones,
hurricanes, typhoons, coral reefs play a very important role
along tropical coastlines to reduce the storm surge.
In coastal communities, it's the storm surge, not the wind,
that can be so damaging and so destructive and deadly,
and so both to land-based infrastructure,
homes, businesses, and also people's lives,
thousands of people can die from these massive storms,
and just the storm surge may cost the global economy
tens of billions, up to over a hundred billion a year
in mitigation costs and construction and repair costs
when these storms come through and coral reefs collapse.
And as I said, warming ocean temperatures
are causing corals to die, but going back a hundred years
in a lot of these communities, overfishing,
dynamite fishing, a lot of places in Asia
throw literally dynamite in the water.
It explodes and stuns the fish.
They float to the surface, they scoop them up with the net,
but that dynamite just happens to destroy everything else,
to cyanide fishing that they'll also do,
to squirt cyanide on these reefs to get the fish stunned
and they scoop them up and it kills everything,
to development and human waste causing too much nutrients
in the water that causes algal blooms.
That's a big problem in places like Florida
and the Caribbean,
or to outright just destruction for ports, piers.
So reefs have been under onslaught for over a century,
and now with climate change, warming ocean temperatures,
it's just really another nail in the coffin
that's terrifying.
- [Peter] Philippe hasn't just studied decline
from a distance.
He's watched it happen underwater over decades,
returning to the same reefs and seeing what remains.
He has a term for why the disappearing reef
has gone unnoticed by much of the world.
He calls it shifting baselines.
- To your point, it's been relatively invisible, right?
We haven't had huge campaigns dating back decades
and decades to protect the reefs.
This is something that has been coming up
after we as a society have realized
we've kind of gone past these critical points.
But before we get to solutions,
I want to talk about your lifetime
because I am anticipating that you got in the water
when you were a kid,
and I imagine you still get in the water as an adult.
So what kinds of declines in coral reef health
and existence have you seen in your own lifetime
and what has that actually looked like?
- I actually did a piece for Discovery several years ago
down in the Florida Keys, and I knew one of the filmmakers
that had filmed there for decades,
and so we got him to give us some footage
that he had shot in the 1980s.
And then this was probably, I want to say 2008 maybe,
so it's quite a bit ago,
so about 20 years later, 25 years later.
And we went back to the exact same spot that he filmed
and we played the footage side by side.
Having grown up diving and snorkeling
and seeing these places,
one of the challenges we faced is this idea
of shifting baselines,
that every successive generation's baseline
for the health of the ecosystem and the environment
is what they were first exposed to.
As I said earlier, even my grandfather saw a massive decline
from the '40s to the '60s that raised alarm bells for him.
Nowadays, we'd look at the '60s and go, "Paradise."
So our context changes.
My context certainly from the '80s to now is terrifying,
but seeing it side by side, the same exact places
with the same cameramen filming them,
seeing what in the '80s were these abundant,
beautiful elkhorn reefs, huge schools of fish
and all of this life, clear, clean, beautiful blue water,
and then the late 2000s,
all of that coral was dead rubble covered in algae
and a few fish poking around.
And we've seen the Great Barrier Reef.
First time I visited the Great Barrier Reef was in the '90s,
going back just a few years ago for a syndicated show
that I hosted for several years,
it was bleached and covered in algae again,
the same places that I'd been that were abundant.
So it really is, you think of it on land,
like seeing an abundant, beautiful rainforest
and going back a few years later and it's been clear cut
and there's some shrubs left.
That's essentially what we're doing in the ocean,
but at a much larger scale.
Again, half the world's coral reefs have disappeared,
about 17% of the Amazon is gone.
So we're doing it much more rapidly in the ocean.
I guarantee you if half the Amazon disappeared,
people would be losing their minds.
But because it's in the ocean, people are kind of like,
"Meh, it's still blue, what's the problem?"
- Just as an opinion question,
if we were to continue with business as usual,
how close do you think we are to losing reefs entirely
if there weren't interventions?
- Functionally, coral reefs will disappear in our lifetime
if we don't take drastic measures.
That is a fact, a tragic fact.
And the reality is that while there will be pockets of reefs
that no doubt survive, we've identified areas of reefs
that are still being resilient,
at scale as a functioning ecosystem around the world,
it doesn't help the Caribbean very much
to have reefs in Indonesia, few smattering of reefs survive
when the reefs in the Caribbean have disappeared.
And actually in most places, up to 95% of the reefs
in the Caribbean have already disappeared.
Massive alarm bells, huge problems.
- I think that's so poignant
that we essentially are creating
this negative feedback loop,
like destroying coral reefs is impacting human communities,
which impacts ecosystems larger and larger,
and we could turn it into a positive feedback loop,
where healthy ecosystems enhance the ability
for healthy human communities
and healthy human communities protect the reefs.
And that's where we're at.
We're trying to shift the feedback loop
from negative to positive,
and people like you are doing that.
- [Peter] The technology to grow
and restore coral reefs already exist.
The problem isn't science, it's the scale.
Philippe has spent decades working on that problem,
starting with a chance meeting with one scientist in Florida
that changed everything.
- I want you to talk to us
about the efforts to restore coral reefs,
kind of the conventional style versus some more innovative,
more scalable approaches that you've been spearheading.
- I was 19 years old and I met a scientist
named Dr. David Vaughan,
who was based out of Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution
in Fort Pierce, Florida.
He had pioneered multiple different kinds of aquacultures
over the decades of his career,
things like clams and oysters, shrimp,
and he turned his attention to coral.
So he started growing corals in land-based nurseries,
farms essentially, and found that they would grow faster
in land-based farms.
And he did that initially for selling those corals
into the ornamental aquarium industry.
Now, because most corals, even today,
in that industry are caught and harvested from the wild
and sold into wild reefs, into aquariums.
- This kind of sounds like poaching kind of.
- Yeah, in a way, I mean, a lot of it's illegal,
some of it is legal, but we're essentially degrading
these already degraded systems to sell into aquariums.
- It doesn't make any sense, and so Dr. Vaughan said,
"Could I farm these, like you would farm saplings
in a greenhouse, and sell those?"
So we're reducing pressure on the ornamental business
off of wild reefs.
So when I met him, I said, "Wow, Dave,
this is pretty amazing technology.
Do you think we could actually grow these corals
in captivity for restoring wild reefs,
not just to sell into the ornamental industry?"
And Dave said, "I don't know, but I think so."
He started a lab at Moates,
Marine Laboratory down in the Keys,
and pioneered all the technology that everybody uses today
for aquaculturing corals in land-based nurseries,
things like microfragmentation,
where he proved you could grow corals 20 times faster
on land than they can grow in the ocean.
And we can harvest heat-tolerant corals
that would eventually, more resilient corals will take over,
but on a geological timeframe, we don't have that timeframe.
We're operating in a human time, destructive timeframe.
And so we can grow heat-tolerant corals much faster
and outplant them back into the wild.
So 22 years or so goes by,
Dave made all this technology available to the world
and many NGOs and nonprofits are utilizing it,
but at a very, very small scale.
So in 20 years, we've restored about one square kilometer
of corals and lost thousands.
And so we were both very frustrated that,
my goodness, we have a big problem,
this technology isn't scaling.
So it's not scaling in scope and size the way it needs to
to outpace ecological decline.
We're losing thousands. We've built one.
I did history at uni, I'm not really good at math,
but I know those numbers don't work out so well.
And so the question then is, what's holding us back?
We have the technology,
we know how to grow these corals quickly,
and a lot of NGOs are doing really laudable work
and it's lovely and really important and I support it,
but replanting a few meters of reef is irrelevant
to actually preventing these systems from collapsing.
So we realize we need to stop thinking about coral reefs
as these biodiverse ecosystems and restore corals by hand,
planting them onto some rubble in the ground.
We need to actually think of reefs as what they are,
which is infrastructure, and the good news is, again,
I think that so many instances from marine-protected areas
to technology and tracking fisheries
to regenerative farming on land
and rebuilding the carbon sequestration potential of soil,
we know there are extraordinary solutions that exist.
Now, the question is not to keep researching them,
not to keep testing them, but to deploy them at scale.
That's the challenge, I believe,
for the next iteration of the environmental movement.
- This has been just a tremendous education for me,
and what keeps coming up for me
is how incredibly intersectional this approach is.
So in the past, we've had conservation biologists,
like myself, I am a trained biologist
working on these issues and coming up with solutions.
But it sounds like with the company that you've created
focused on solutions for reefs,
you have people with skills in biology and ecology,
but also urban planning
and business, certainly finance.
I mean, tell me about all of the different skill sets
that come to play to make this successful.
- Well, it's what's so fascinating about this work.
Fundamentally, the team that we've brought together
is just what you're saying, it's multidisciplinary.
We have 3D construction printers, engineers, biologists,
farmers that are farming the coral
the way you would farm anything,
technologists using AI and machine learning.
We have engineers that are just building tanks
and maintaining these systems,
divers and marine biologists that are going out
and planting these corals and restoring these reefs
and monitoring and tracking them.
People building underwater drones that we're testing
and training the AI models to monitor
and maintain these reefs over time.
Because when you think about them
as critical infrastructure,
you build a port, a road, a rail and it breaks down,
you don't just say, "Oh, good luck."
You maintain it over time.
So it is bringing together a multidisciplinary approach
to solving this kind of a problem
that is the only way we're going to be able to do it.
- Can I just back you up for a moment,
because did you say 3D printing coral?
- So we're not 3D printing coral.
We're 3D printing the underlying structure.
So think about it as the foundation.
So coral reefs, as I said, over millennia,
each generation of coral will build its little home,
and then the next generation will build a little home
on that and millions of them all together,
they layer upon layer upon layer,
and that's how a reef is built.
We don't have that time.
When coral dies, surprisingly,
that structure degrades relatively quickly,
and so hence, Caribbean islands
that not only don't have coral, they don't have reefs,
so there's no protection from this storm surgery,
or Vietnam and the Philippines and Indonesia, et cetera.
So what we do is use 3D construction printers
to actually mimic what that coral structure would be,
the nooks and crannies, the hydrological nature of that
in order to diffuse and distribute the energy
from storm surge, which is what regular coral reefs do.
Currently, sea walls, which is usually the solution,
they're designed literally as that,
a wall to stop the energy of the ocean,
and that energy then is diverted up or down the coast,
digging out beaches, destroying currents,
destroying the hydrology of those areas.
So seawalls can eventually break down
because you can't beat the ocean.
Reefs evolved over millions of years with the ocean
to diffuse and disperse that energy with all, again,
the little pillars and nooks and crannies and cracks
and caves, et cetera.
So we can reprint that kind of structure
with 3D construction printers to high fidelity, high detail,
place that in the water,
and then you plant the corals on top of that
and then let them do their thing.
- [Peter] The commercial model in the 3D printing
solved the infrastructure problem,
but the coral itself still has to survive in warming water.
That's where nature has quietly been doing
something remarkable,
and Philippe has found a way to accelerate it.
- So I also heard you talk about when the King of Jordan,
when you got that person's attention
and they were so jazzed by these solutions,
you mentioned that that part of the world
has some heat-tolerant corals,
and considering we have a warming climate,
is this something to get excited about?
- It's actually the resilience of nature.
So we see heat-tolerant corals around the world,
which is the good news.
Those corals over, again, a geological timeframe
will no doubt take over that ecosystem,
but we don't have that time.
So we instead, right, so for example, a stony coral,
like a porites, like a brain coral,
maybe think of like a kind of half dome lump of coral,
the size of a dinner plate can take up to 75 years
from one polyp to grow that big.
In the farm, we can engineer those in two years.
- Wow.
- So we can harvest a small amount of donor corals,
grow them out exponentially faster in our farms
and create heat-tolerant and sexually mature corals
and replace those in the water that would take 75 years
for one dinner plate size, then one larvae out of a million
would survive and it would land
and then another 75 years for that,
and that's the timescale we're talking about.
We don't have that time.
So we can accelerate that dramatically.
And the good news is there are heat-tolerant corals
all over the world.
We don't exactly know why.
The underlying process is that when the water gets warmer,
corals have a symbiotic relationship with the algae
that we call zooxanthella.
And as the water temperature increases,
zooxanthella metabolism increases,
and therefore, they create more free radicals that are toxic
to the coral and the coral ejects that zooxanthella.
Problem is that algae also photosynthesizes
and creates some food for the coral.
So when coral bleaches, it's not dead,
it's just evicted the algae that gives it its color.
It's when the coral, after three or four weeks,
it actually slowly starves to death.
And when it turns green and mucky full of algae,
then it's dead.
And so when corals bleach, if the temperature gets better,
they'll re-invite that algae back and they'll recover.
But there are corals out there that, for some reason,
aren't as fussed by those free radicals
that the zooxanthella create in higher water temperatures.
Lots of research into the underlying reasons for that.
We don't know necessarily,
but there's a lot of research that's happening.
But what we do know is that practically and functionally,
we can pull stuff out of the water,
grow it, and replant it, and we are running out of time.
The challenge, the trap we can find ourselves in
is researching forever.
Research, research, research, research, research, research,
research, research, research,
and then we're going to do a little more research.
Meanwhile, the corals are dying.
And there's a point where we need to continue the research,
but we also need to say enough is enough,
good is good enough, and it's triage time.
We need to start putting stuff back in the water
and rebuilding these systems, and that's what we're doing.
And the good news is it works anywhere in the world,
and again, the good news is the technologies exist.
It's just finding a way to make these
investible, profitable investments
that protect land-based infrastructure and people's lives
and rebuild fisheries and tourist amenities
to unlock the scale of capital needed to do the work.
It's doable. It's doable.
- For all intents and purposes, we have reason to believe
that this could make a huge positive impact
for coral reefs worldwide.
There are obviously still, unfortunately,
huge threats, right?
There's a lot working against reefs,
but there's some pushback.
You're creating ways to push back
and to keep the reefs thriving and building
and coming back stronger.
So let's say that in places we can fast-forward
to a certain amount of time and see it working.
What does a restored reef look like
and what does it bring along with it?
What other biodiversity gets kind of pulled back in
to that restored ecosystem?
- I dream every day of a world where we rebuild abundance
in the ocean, and it's possible,
where people can feed themselves,
where shorelines and coastal ecosystems are healthy
from mangroves and wetlands and seagrass and coral reefs,
where my daughters can live in a world
that was as rich as the one that I was born into,
reefs teeming with life, microorganisms and crustaceans
and mollusks and fish.
And I dream of a world where coral reefs will continue
to provide the foundation for a healthy, abundant ocean
for generations to come.
And that's what we are dedicated to doing,
and we do not accept that there's no hope.
- Yeah. Yeah. - There's always hope.
- And then, Philippe, a challenging question I'm asking
for you is what can the average everyday person do
to help support coral reefs?
- Conservation in nature shouldn't be a partisan issue.
It should be a bipartisan one.
Also, when we think about where we go on vacation,
looking for resorts and developments
that are protecting their coastlines
and investing in restoration projects
and supporting their communities.
Shopping is politics as Bono said,
and we have a lot of power with our wallets.
And just recognizing the superpower that each of us have
as storytellers, be it to an audience
in a television program like "Wild Kingdom"
or around the dinner table, that we are storytellers
and we need to help people understand
that humanity cannot thrive on this planet
if the ocean cannot thrive.
- [Peter] Half the world's coral reef gone
in a single lifetime.
95% of the Caribbean reefs are already lost,
and yet, brain corals that would take 75 years
to grow in the wild, farmed in only two.
Reefs rebuilt kilometer by kilometer
from the ocean floor up.
The science works.
The question now is whether we can move fast enough.
This is "Back from the Brink"
from Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom."
(gentle music)
- If this episode was super intriguing for you,
follow or subscribe, leave a review,
and send it to the ocean lover, the snorkeler,
or the person in your life
who had no idea coral reefs were even in crisis.
I'm Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant, and I'll see you next time.
- [Narrator] The "Back from the Brink" podcast
is sponsored by Mutual of Omaha's "Wild Kingdom,"
hosted by Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant,
narrated by Peter Gros.
Executive producers are Jen Wulf
and Jenny Van Soelen.
Podcast production by Lower Street Media.
(dramatic music)
