Study: Green-washing marine conservation: the use of artificial reefs for fisheries and coral restoration needs oversight (DOI: 10.1111/conl.13141)
EXPERT Q&A
Millions of tires, old washing machines, barges, warships, covering the ocean floor with thousands of square kilometers of concrete-even giant, concrete spheres full of holes: these are all things used to build artificial reefs.
Advocates of artificial reefs say they are needed because they promote habitat for fish and increase biodiversity. These are indeed potential solutions to pressing problems: global oceans are faced with widespread degradation of habitat, overfishing and a loss of biodiversity. And recent legislation such as the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act has incentivized governments, industries and private foundations to explore infrastructure and technologies to make fishing and other ways we use our oceans more sustainable, according to Jacob Allgeier, University of Michigan professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.
But Allgeier argues in a study published in Conservation Letters that before we hastily engineer fixes to these issues, we must carefully study the effects any proposed solution may have on the systems they're intended to benefit.
Can you tell us what artificial reefs are and how people use them?
People have been making artificial reefs for millennia. People recognize that fish aggregate around structure, and when they aggregate around structure, they're easier to catch. So people have employed them in fisheries contexts forever. No matter where you go in the world, they exist.
They can be anything from somebody chucking a washing machine in the ocean or lake to something that's really formal, like these reef complexes off of the coastal shelf of Portugal. Japan has built concrete structures and put trees in them in certain ways. Some reefs even are on some level a type of geoengineering, where they are installed along currents so that the current pushes against it in ways that will increase nutrient availability and phytoplankton, which will concentrate fish. There's a high diversity in how people use them and apply them.
The main argument I've been interested in for a long time is are reefs just a mechanism of attraction, or is there actually an additional production that occurs with it. That's what we study in our lab.
Why is it important to understand the science behind artificial reefs?
We don't know what they're actually doing. Not only can they promote overfishing, but they also could just be degrading habitat. We don't know if the place that we're putting them is habitat that we need to be conserving-we don't know if it's good for it or if it's bad for it. We don't know what it's doing for the invertebrate communities. There are just all these things we don't know, so how can we say that putting these out there is a good thing?
On one hand, in the Bahamas, they sink barges to create artificial reefs. They dump a car here and there. It probably isn't a good thing, but the scale is maybe negligible. But on the other hand, when we're talking about dropping in these huge warships or building massive concrete structures that they put out at massive scales, proposing to cover hundreds of square kilometers with concrete-the scale is so important, and that's the basis of this article.
Even though we do need to make rapid changes, it just has to be done with science behind it. If it costs more money or if it takes more time, then I think we should spend that money and take that time.
What kind of solutions do you propose?
We could have an international governing body that sets parameters for reasonable ways of building reefs. But the best thing we could do is that each project should have a pilot study, and the governments where these reefs are proposed should have accountability for the pilots. The problem with that is that testing in this way is so expensive and the governments in many of these places, especially in the tropics, are poor.
A lot of the situations are pretty dire, and so I fully recognize that it's tough to say you need a pilot, and pilots take time. But you would have people studying the proposed project. I'm an advocate of those kinds of things because they create jobs. Those are jobs and industries we want to support.
The United Nations is dumping huge amounts of money into marine conservation over the next decade. If there could be a consortium of people including scientists, conservationists and practitioners, then you could imagine how it could expand and become a bridging system wherever you go.
The consortium could work with groups that are already in specific regions doing marine conservation, and they could receive funding and support to support artificial reef pilot projects. Even if the project didn't work in the end, you'd be investing in their conservation infrastructure, and do it in a way that engages with local fishers, providing educational information about their fisheries.
What prompted you to think about this?
I started writing this as a more broad topic about greenwashing in conservation. I think it's a scary problem because funds are limited and energy is limited, and the vast majority of conservation that I've ever been around is not being led by science. That's alarming.
I'm fully aware of the fact that science is hard, science is slow, and there's a lot of places, particularly in developing countries that don't have the means for it. I've also worked with people that I know mean well. But what if the drive to do good deeds fast creates these channels that somehow make it ok for people that have a lot of power and a lot of money to come in and just play God? Artificial reefs are sort of a microcosm of a bigger issue, and it's one I happen to know a lot about, and can wrap my mind around really easily.
