Gili Eco Trust - Biorock Project

BIOROCK TO RESTORE MARINE RESOURCES ON GILI TRAWANGAN

Coral around the Gili islands has suffered substantial damages during previous years and it is largely agreed upon that some proactive steps are necessary in order to prevent further destruction. The Gili Islands are dependent on a healthy marine habitat for their fisheries, tourism, sand supply, shore protection and marine biodiversity.

This habitat has been largely damaged by combinations of coral heatstroke, disease, land-based sewage, global sea level rise, over-fishing and direct physical damage from destructive fishing practices, boats, anchors, tourists and reef harvesting. As a result, renewable marine resources are declining, endangering local food supplies, shorelines and tourism income.

Without large-scale restoration of degraded habitats to make them capable of supporting larger fish and shellfish populations, there will be fewer fishes in the future and without healthy growing corals, there will be fewer beaches or tourism income, affecting all business owners on the island. Restoration of our degraded reefs and coastal habitats on a scale that makes a difference must be an active environmental priority for local businesses and not an afterthought.

However, there is a much more serious purpose to these projects than for ecotourism. By keeping coral alive under lethal conditions and restoring coral reefs where they cannot recover naturally, we aim to restore the reefs and their fisheries, to keep ecosystems from going extinct from global warming, and to protect the shoreline from vanishing under the waves.

BIOROCK TO FIGHT BEACH EROSION ON GILI TRAWANGAN

The erosion in the Gili islands is getting worse. Beach now needs to be held by sand bags and sea walls. A project has been completed in the Maldives (Maldives shorelines: growing a beach by Thomas J. Goreau, Wolf Hilbertz, & Azeez A.Hacheem, may 1998) with the goal of developing a sustainable technology that can keep the Maldives from disappearing. For this reason they started growing a reef in front of a severely eroded beach on the tourist resort island of Ihuru, in North Male Atoll. The project is 45 meters long (140 feet), about 4-8 meters wide, and 1.5 meters high. It was constructed with welded steel rods at a fraction of the cost of a concrete or rock wall. This structure was called the Necklace, because it was intended to be the first stage in restoring the ring reef around the entire island and protecting its lovely beaches without concrete, dead coral walls, or plastic mesh bags pumped full of sand, which invariably disintegrate, rip, and leave plastic debris littering the sand.

During the 6^th Biorock workshop, 3 sponsors (Gili Eco Villas, Kokita and Karma Kayak) decided to fund this Biorock necklace technology in the north of Gili Trawangan. We have placed and connected long Biorock structures in the middle of the platter in front of these sponsors. We have recycling a lot of rubble from the island to create a real wave breaker. The structure is porous and the way we set it up allows the waves’ energy and speed to be slowed down but not reflected.

Around the world, small islands such as the Gili Islands are disappearing because of the sea level rising, global warming and destruction/damages on the reefs. The beach slowly disappears and the sea reaches the villages. Many people think that by building sea wall or other big wave breaker they will stop the erosion, but they actually making it worst. The solution is to copy the natural process and to regenerate a coral barrier to break the wave action or to set up a system which will be similar to the natural reef protection.

The problem with sea wall and other expensive technology on the beach is that waves still break on the beach and get their energy reflected onto the wall. So waves break forcefully on the beach and take the sand off the beach back. A structure such as the necklace or the Biorock wave breaker will slow down the waves and get them to bring sand onto the beach. On Gili Trawangan, results have been very positive and impressive. None of the beach is missing even after the big storms that hit the north of the island in December and January 2010, and the beach has grown few meters long and is less steep in one year only. So the sponsors’ guests can enjoy laying on the beach and sunbathing on this white sand!

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