Coral reefs are vital to both marine and human life. Yet they face serious threats from climate change, pollution, overfishing and habitat destruction.
Now, ASU is working with community leaders in Hawaii to preserve and restore the battered ecosystems.
The $25 million ʻĀkoʻakoʻa collaboration will unite ASU researchers, government agencies, NGOs and community leaders behind preserving and restoring Hawaiian reefs and coastlines.
In the Hawaiian language, ʻĀkoʻakoʻa, means both “coral” and “to assemble.”
“In my lifetime, we've seen a radical decline in our coral reefs in Hawaii,” said ASU’s Greg Asner, who leads the collaboration and is a longtime Hawaii resident. “It's not uniform; some islands are worse off than others. But none of them are like they were.”
In 2015 and 2019, major marine heat waves passed through the Hawaiian Islands. The first killed half the affected corals in 12 weeks; the second wiped out 25% of what remained. Overfishing and pollution threaten to finish the job.
“So the climate, pollution and overfishing are all kind of coming together as a three way punch,” said Asner. “And this new program, ʻĀkoʻakoʻa, is very heavily focused on confronting all three of those problems.”
Hawaii comprises more than 130 islands, atolls and seamounts stretching across 1,500 miles. The sheer reach of the undertaking requires collaboration — and that’s before considering jurisdictional issues: Regulating overfishing falls under the State of Hawaii’s jurisdiction, whereas land-based pollution requires a more grassroots approach.
“That one is very community based — literally, getting in front of HOAs, getting in front of community leaders and their community members, bringing the counties to those meetings because the counties have the jurisdiction over what types of septic systems go in — really basic stuff like that,” said Asner.
For more technical and scientific issues, such as oceanic chemistry and climate change, Asner will build on his decade spent monitoring corals and oceanic chemistry from planes, ships and satellites.
The grant will also establish one of the largest coral restoration and propagation centers in the world, on the Big Island’s Kona Coast.
“It is a large facility that will let us bring in corals, figure out genetically which ones are thermally tolerant, try to propagate those corals from one to 100, or one to X number, and get them back out there, so that these reefs become more and more thermally resilient,” said Asner.
Asner also directs of ASU’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science, which has locations in Tempe and Hilo, Hawaii. While some of Hawaii’s eight main islands have research and education resources, Asner saw unmet needs on the Big Island.
“So we're filling gaps rather than being redundant in some of the other parts of the state with like the University of Hawaii, who we are highly collaborative with, has their major campuses on the island of Oahu.”
Asner said the efforts in the Aloha State add to ASU’s work already underway elsewhere in the Pacific.
“The faculty and their labs have their hands in all sorts of spaces — working on coral reefs, working on food security, through fisheries, climate change and sea level rise,” he said. “We have faculty that are working in other parts of the Pacific Rim, and even around the world.
The university also recently launched its School of Ocean Futures, which operates in Tempe, Hawaii and Bermuda. The institutions are part of ASU’s overarching Global Futures Laboratory, which works with communities to confront pressing problems like sustainability, climate change and biodiversity loss worldwide.
Asner says the work benefits from the guidance of Hawaiian culture, which has coexisted with and revered corals for centuries, even when the population reached an estimated population of 100,000 to 1 million people prior to European contact.
“The cultural component of this — it’s not even a component; it's the compass,” he said. “Not only have they been here for centuries, but they created the know-how to manage these ecosystems.”
As for ʻĀkoʻakoʻa, Asner said it’s time to invest in place-based culture and look beyond the limits of Western science, which he said is best used to address functional problems, “like the ones that we've created, like this climate issue, or this wastewater issue.”
“Science is not the pill that everyone needs to take to solve all of our problems,” he said. “It's this blended sort of effort between science and community engagement, community, cultural leadership and so forth.”
