From Saudi Arabia to the World; KAUST Coral Restoration Initiative

Coral reefs, they're just beautiful. The colors, the shapes, the abundance of life. But beyond this beauty, coral reefs are very important to humans. As a teenager, I found the power of the ocean to heal me. So I wanted to become a scientist, to understand that connection between the ocean and ourselves. I did not sign up in science to be a notary of the demise of oceans. We are witnessing the loss of coral reefs under warming climates. This could be a major extinction event comparable to the loss of dinosaurs. But for the first time in history, we are not just passive observers. Now we're empowered to turn around the fate of coral reefs from one of loss to one of recovery and gain. We can't be the generation that admired the Red Sea so much, but then failed to protect it. Looking around the world, I found only one place that had the ambition and the momentum to develop solutions, and that was Saudi Arabia, and specifically King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. The first proposed location for building the largest coral nursery on Earth. It was an empty desert facing the sea. Immediate feedbacks were, are you realistic? support fish, they support seagrass, they support megafauna, they break the waves, they allow people to fish and survive, they provide food. They are a heartbeat of the world. I still remember the first batch of tanks when we connected them, when we light them up. Just looking at those tanks, it made me feel that the future is possible and here we are today celebrating the day where it is actually happening and corals are being produced. How do the corals grow? How do we get them in? How do we get them out? How long do we need to keep them? What happens when we ramp up and ramp down the temperature in the tanks? All the experiments that we do aim to gain the knowledge so that we know we can do this at scale. We have a unique scientific community working together to the ultimate goal of a functional and healthy reef. It's a major feat of science and engineering and a collective effort from hundreds of people. My job is the thing that I love the most. Protecting the marine environment is the most precious thing ever. I wanted to do this job because it's something impactful. It's something that the next generations will thank us for. Walking into the nursery and seeing so many people working towards the same goal. We are literally restoring a reef, one coral at a time. It's really inspiring. We're operating a little bit like a fertility clinic, but for corals. We want to make sure that we have preserved some of the babies so that they are ready to be planted out onto the reef. It's a strange but beautiful feeling because you take care of this little thing for so long and you watch it grow but you know that you have to take it underwater where it really belongs. The most successful restoration projects act on a dynamic interplay between the practitioners on the ground and the scientists and the research that's required to optimize all of that restoration work. These corals are going directly to the Red Sea, specifically around Shusha Island where we have outplant sites. Our nursery is usually 10 to 12 meters deep. We dive every day taking care of our baby corals, making sure they're healthy and they're growing. I have got to work with some amazing young Saudis that have come through our apprenticeship program. This is a mission for Saudi Arabia, for future generations, youths in marine science, females in marine science, scientists. We're doing work that will change the world. We live in a time where technology is so advanced that we can address old questions with new tools. When you treat a patient, the first thing you do is you ask about the family history. We do the same with corals. We try to understand the coral identity. Not all coral species are the same. They have different growth rates, different susceptibility to higher temperatures. Corals are animals, they are not rocks. And one way to keep them alive is to give them medicine when they are sick. We are promoting health through the use of probiotics. How many images do you have in this screen? This looks phenomenal. Most divers working on coral reef monitoring or coral restoration are really focused on a small area. But what we've done is we've created a 100 hectare digital replicate of the reefs. Around 3 million images stitched together to create a virtual 3D replicate of that coral reef. My teammates can sit on their computers and dive into the Shusha Reefscape and can start making more informed decisions. Once you start to see the coral take hold and recover and grow through all that hard work, the possibilities become boundless. This work matters because the impact is not only on the Red Sea. Restoring a reef here is like restoring the reef globally. We need to deploy the answers across the rest of the world. It's a really critical part of how restoration will become a greater global movement. And we don't do that alone. We have another instrument called CORAL DB, through which we collaborate with about 5,000 scientists around the world. We are confident that we can help corals overcome this challenge, but we're faced with increasing risks. The El Niño event that is now growing in the Pacific is the largest in history. We need to act quickly. We need to take representative species of this coral and we need to save it. We need to take it out of the ocean. To have a backup of the most important corals from everywhere in the world in a single facility would be a unique opportunity to have a guaranteed pathway to bring those corals back. Call it an insurance policy. There's a ticking clock to save the world's corals and the coral nursery is the first pillar of that network. The greatest legacy that we could have is that this project accelerates coral reef restoration elsewhere. To have the dream of rebuilding coral reefs at scale is no less than a moonshot. In that moonshot, we have delivered already the spacecraft. That is the nursery sitting at Hadda Beach. Now we need to reach to the moon. I hope we can take this from Saudi Arabia to the world. Shukran, Saudi Arabia.