The coral around the Gili islands has suffered substantial damage 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 dependant 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 practises, 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 fish 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 corals alive under lethal conditions and restoring coral reefs where they cannot recover naturally, we aim to restore the reef and its fisheries, to keep ecosystems from going extinct from global warming, and to protect the shoreline from vanishing under the waves.

The erosion in the Gili islands is getting worse. The 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.

Maldives at the start of the project: eroded beaches held by sand bags, palm trees collapsing into the sea, very expensive concrete walls of Male, and the BioRock necklace placed in May 2001.      
The results have been astonishing. When it was built the structure lay amid the best snorkeling reef in any tourist island in the Maldives, but in 1998, almost all the surrounding reef corals died when water temperatures reached up to 34 degrees C. In contrast, most corals on the Necklace survived. The Necklace reef has become a haven for fish, like Giant Moray eels, sweetlips, triggerfish, and others now rarely seen on the dead reef. Fish line up patiently to be groomed by cleaner fish and shrimps, making it an ideal place to see many species behaving without aggression to each other.
The effect on the beach has been even more incredible. As the limestone rock reef and the corals on it grow more massive, the waves that once surged right through it to batter the beach now slow down. As the waves pass through, the friction of the growing surface constantly increases. As a result, sand once held suspended in the water is settling on the seabed.
In the last two years, the once-eroding beach has grown by 15 meters, and the sand is now forming a sandbar pointing right to the structure. Hopefully, this will assist future generations of Maldvians and tourists to continue to enjoy their idyllic moments of peace on the shoreline while this unique country grows its way out of the very real threats of global warming and sea level rise.
Two years later: the necklace is now full of corals and fish and the sand is accumulating at the base of the necklace. At the start the sand bags were piled against the deck to keep it from collapsing. Now the beach extends 15 meters from the deck

During the 6th Biorock workshop, 3 sponsors (Gili Eco Villas, Kokita, 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. Wew have recycling a lot of rubble from the island to create a real wave breaker. The structure is porus and the way we set it up allows the wave's energy and speed to be slowed down but not reflected.

Around the world, small islands such as the Gili Islands are disapearing because of the sea level rising, global warming and destruction/damages on the reefs. The beach slowly disapear and the sea reach 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 technics on the beach is that the waves still break on the beach and get their energy reflected onto the wall. So the waves break forceflully on the beach and take the sand off the beach with them when they return. A structure such as the necklace or the Biorock wave breaker will slow down the waves and get the waves to bring the sand onto the beach. On the Gili Trawangan Structures, the 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, and the beach has already grown few meters long and is not as steep as last year. So the sponsors guests can enjoy laying on the beach and sunbathing on this white sand!

We hope that for the next Biorock workshop many new sponsors would join and decide to build some anti-erosion reefs to protect and grow their missing beach.