https://youtu.be/zjCuWR1iEoc
Draft July 20 2018
Thomas J. F. Goreau & Thomas P. Sarkisian
Global Coral Reef Alliance (GCRA)
GROW YOUR OWN BIOROCK REEF IN A BOX
Corals are dying at accelerating rates from global warming, new diseases, harmful algae blooms caused by sewage and fertilizer, global sea level rise, and many other long known and intensifying threats to corals. Coral reefs, the most biodiverse, productive, valuable, and vulnerable marine ecosystem (Goreau, Goreau, & Goreau, 1979), are now most of the way through a human-caused mass extinction.
The only reef regeneration methods that can and will work in today’s and tomorrow’s stresses must greatly increase: 1) settlement, 2) growth, 3) survival, & 4) resistance to extreme high temperature, mud, and pollution stress events.
Only one method does all this for corals and all marine organisms: Biorock. Invented and developed by the late Prof. Wolf Hilbertz and Tom Goreau of the Global Coral Reef Alliance, Biorock uniquely stimulates natural biophysical and biochemical energy production by marine organisms, so they have much higher recruitment, growth, survival, and resistance to severe high temperature stress events (Goreau 2014; Goreau & Trench 2014).
Biorock technology uniquely preserves reefs when they would die, regenerates dead and dying reefs, and rapidly grows back severely eroded beaches at record rates even where there has been no natural recovery (Goreau & Prong, 2017). Biorock methods are the only hope to regenerate complete coral reef ecosystems in a rapidly changing world, where the worst lies ahead.
The other methods work, albeit at much slower rates than Biorock, only when the water is not too hot, muddy, or polluted. Then the corals die, while Biorock reef corals survive. Biorock is the only method that shows long-term results, corals grown by all other methods die in severe bleaching stress events. Reef restoration methods that have no hope of adapting to a hotter, muddier, more polluted future are defined as Pre-Darwinian reef restoration, because they are just versions of coral fragmentation methods known for more than 200 years.
Biorock is the only Post-Darwinian method of marine ecosystem regeneration, a quantum leap in technology uniquely capable of adapting marine organisms to severe stresses already upon us, which will accelerate in coming decades, until CO2 is reduced to safe levels (Goreau, 2017). Biorock Coral Arks are currently growing around 80% of all reef building coral genera and around half of all species, but need to be greatly expanded in all areas that are now losing their corals.
More than 500 Biorock reefs, built in more than 40 countries, have worked, but many were not maintained due to lack of funds and committed local management. In Indonesia, where more than 400 Biorock reefs are now growing around half of the coral species in the world, local Biorock teams were awarded the United Nations Equator Award for Community-Based Development and the Special United Nations Development Programme Award for Oceans and Coastal Management, for regenerating reefs and creating a sustainable ecotourism economy.
Many coral restoration groups all around the world, having wasted scarce and well-intended time and money on pre-Darwinian reef restoration methods that have not worked, are now desperate to try Biorock post-Darwinian reef restoration where all else has failed. But they lack correct training and materials to do so successfully.
In order to ensure effective and large-scale Biorock Coral Ark (BCA) programs worldwide as rapidly as possible, we will use XPrize funds to sell low cost Global Coral Reef Alliance (GCRA) Biorock Reef in a Box (BRB) kits that anyone can use, plug and play, to charge a reef project that they build themselves on their own site. These will be in sizes suitable for pilot projects ranging from 1, 5, 10, 20 meters, with a range of powering, datalogging, and control options. GCRA professional advice will be available to help local partners design and implement site-specific larger projects for beach regeneration, shore protection, fisheries habitat, sustainable mariculture, ecotourism, biodiversity preservation, or other purposes.
Availability of GCRA BRB kits, with advice on implementing and maintaining projects, will allow community-based ecosystem management groups around the world to rapidly start pilot projects, gain experience and advice to quickly expand local Biorock Coral Arks, and kickstart worldwide efforts on the scale essential to save and regenerate global coral reef biodiversity and ecosystem services.
GCRA is always ready to directly to share its experience inventing and developing Biorock’s unique life-regenerating technology through helping local groups apply Biorock methods to save and regrow their reefs, everywhere people are ready to learn modern BCA methods and maintain them.
