Reefs in crisis

Australia

IF YOU live in the Pacific islands chances are that you live near a coral reef in crisis.

Internationally recognised coral bi ologist, Dr John Veron, from the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville estimates 70 per cent of the reefs in the Indian and Pacific Oceans have been degraded in some way.

Dr Leon Zann, a specialist in Pacific island reefs says, “We have seen the collapse of reef ecosystems near virtu ally all major urbanised areas” in the islands.

Reefs near Pacific island capitals such as Suva, Nuku’alofa, Apia, Tarawa, Port Vila and Pago Pago are, according to Dr Zann, suffering “grave ecological problems”.

That does not mean the Pacific islands do not have large areas of

beautiful and intact reef. They do around the myriad of islands away from the main centres. The problem is that damage near heavily populated areas is dramatic and in certain patches, as Dr Zann points out, so severe that it has led to the collapse of the entire ecosystem.

The problems are caused simply by too many people.

In Suva, for instance, in an area which used to support around 1000 people there are now 120,000 with the reef just two kilometres offshore.

The reefs’ difficulties began as much as a century ago.

On Western Samoa’s heavily populated Upolu Island, for instance, large scale clearing of coastal forest for copra plantations led to erosion and heavy siltation as topsoil clogged the reefs and coastal streams.

As the population grew so did the human and animal waste and the amount of nitrogen and phosphates from fertilisers leaching around the reefs.

In Western Samoa overfishing has led to the extinction of two species of giant clam. In Fiji and Tonga the story is the same.

Local breeding populations of turtles have been so badly affected that turtles caught in many island countries are migrants from breeding populations in Australia or French Polynesia.

In American Samoa industry and a leaking World War II wreck carrying a dangerous cargo, have pushed lead and cadmium levels so high that the taking of fish from Pago harbour and surrounding areas has been banned.

To top it all the damaging crown of thorns starfish has devastated many reefs which, when subject to other stresses such as pollution, find it difficult to regenerate.

Dealing with these problems requires long term solutions sewage treatment or disposal on land, the relocation of rubbish dumps, controls on industrial and agricultural waste and on silt producing clearing or construction, as well as curbs on population growth and migration to the cities.

None of the solutions are easy; if they are not prohibitively expensive they are politically difficult.

Many governments are only too aware their rubbish

dumps, created in mangrove swamps to keep them away from areas people use, are in a highly sensitive spot; one which is used as breeding ground for fish and other marine species and from which it is impossible to prevent leaching for toxins into the marine environment.

With land having so much cul tural importance in the Pacific, getting permission for new dump sites is not easy.

Human waste is perhaps the biggest problem of all. After nine years working in the Pacific, Dr Zann, now a senior scientist with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, says his biggest environ mental fear is not for the reefs themselves but for the health of the humans living around them.

Recently, water borne human

waste has caused outbreaks of cholera and typhus in a number of island nations as well as spreading hepatitis. To treat the waste to a level which would kill disease causing agents is well beyond island budgets.

The Pacific islands are not the only ones to be wrestling with water pollution problems.

Until just a few years ago, in Sydney, the waste of one million used to pour out into the water near its famous city beaches. It was not until brown scum became a regular feature on our coast that the government spent the hundreds of millions of dollars necessary just to pump the effluent further out to sea.

Amid all the gloom there are some hopeful signs.

Australia has just embarked on an ambitious exercise which will provide an inventory of its entire marine environment and form the basis for a strategy to protect it into the next century.

The first step, a State of the Marine Environment report, will describe every marine environment in detail setting out each one’s environmental assets and problems as well as the sort of use people want to make of the area.

Dr Zann is co-ordinating the project. He says he hopes it will lead to a network of multi-use marine protected areas like the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. In the islands, too, governments are aware of the problems facing reefs. The Apia-based South Pacific Regional Environment Program (SPREP) is putting a high priority on integrated Coastal Zone Management which tries to deal with the multiplicity of problems which are combining to stress urban reefs.

Essentially it aims to make sure planning decisions by every government department take account of environmental consequences and to provide the basic information necessary to know what those consequences might be.

At the South Pacific Commission the under-funded inshore fisheries program is doing its best to stop overfishing.

Probably the most hopeful sign is the increasing willingness of agencies and governments to involve local landowners in solutions; solutions which, as a result, often have the spin-off of creating jobs which can slow the drift to the cities as well as provide a welcome income to locals. □

Jemima

Garrett