A former UAE resident who spent years designing the country’s pavilions at world expos is publishing a book on how to save coral reefs from climate change.
Peter Vine is best known for creating the UAE’s stunning sand dune pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010. Before that, he was a marine biologist who conducted detailed studies of coral reefs in the Red Sea.
His new book, Growth and Decay of Coral Reefs: Fifty Years of Learning, looks at the threats facing coral reefs today and how to slow the process.
Things have changed drastically; I wanted to put down a marker to say this is what it was like in the 1970s.
“In 2015 I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and I wanted to put down on paper my experiences from years ago and compare them to the situation with coral reefs today,” he told The National.
Mr Vine said he found all his notes from the 1970s and was fascinated by how he described the reefs then.
“Things have changed so dramatically. I wanted to put down a marker to say this is how it was in the 1970s. At that time I surveyed 30 different reefs in the Red Sea,” he said.
Mr Vine’s career has included a stint as a teacher on the Pacific atoll of Tarawa with the British organisation Voluntary Service Overseas.
It was there that he developed his diving skills and researched coral reefs, which he continued in the Red Sea, where he undertook extensive underwater surveys.
Between 1996 and 2015, Mr Vine lived in the United Arab Emirates and worked on projects in the country, with his last World Expo being in Milan in 2015.
Following his retirement, he published further findings from his Red Sea research and wrote a memoir called Spirorbis. Now 78, the British father of three lives in Ireland.
In preparing Growth and Decay of Coral Reefs, Mr Vine worked with illustrator Fiona Martin, who produced images of the fish and coral he encountered.
One of his main interests was the ‘turf war’ between algae and coral, and how the presence of herbivores, both fish and invertebrates, helps to limit algae growth and create a more species-rich ecosystem.
Mr Vine demonstrated this with experiments using bathroom tiles attached to reefs. Some of the tiles were protected by wire – making them inaccessible to herbivores – and quickly became covered in green algae.
One of the challenges facing coral reefs today is the loss of herbivores due to overfishing. They are also threatened by tourism development, land reclamation, plastic and oil pollution, invasive species, dumping and disease.
One of the biggest problems is climate change, he said, which is warming the oceans and causing bleaching, where corals expel the tiny algae with which they normally live in harmony.
“Alarm bells are ringing everywhere,” he said. “It’s frightening to see what is going to happen.”
The effects are being felt on coral reefs in the Arabian Gulf, which have suffered “devastating losses”, said John Burt, an associate professor of biology at New York University Abu Dhabi who studies coral reefs.
“The increasing frequency of marine heat waves suggests that the prognosis for reefs in the Gulf or elsewhere is not good,” he said.
“The general consensus among reef scientists is that reefs as we know them will cease to exist by 2050 unless there are dramatic changes in fossil fuel use and much more active interventions to conserve and restore reefs.”
He said that in the Arabian Gulf, coral bleaching has become more frequent and severe over the past three decades as a result of warming caused by climate change.
He said that “one of the most severe events occurred in 2017, when nearly three-quarters of the living coral was lost from reefs along the southern Gulf coast of the United Arab Emirates” and extended to Saudi and Iranian reefs.
There was another severe event in 2021, Mr Burt said, when reefs on the UAE’s east coast and offshore islands, including Sir Bu Nair, “lost much of their coral to bleaching”.
“Sadly, we are currently witnessing another mass bleaching event, with virtually all the corals at our survey sites currently completely bleached,” he said.
One thing Mr Vine has observed over the decades is the ability of coral reefs to recover after significant losses.
However, problems such as ocean acidification – a consequence of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the air – make it very difficult for corals to recover from the damage done to the larval stages of corals.
“There is only one solution: less carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the ocean. It’s that simple,” he said. “If we don’t do that, these things will continue to plague us.
“I would ask what’s the point of making huge efforts to save corals if the conditions in which they live are changing so rapidly that the reefs are dying anyway.”
