| Gili Eco Trust |
“You really should talk with Delphine Robbe.” Here on the Gili Islands, within eyeshot of the Indonesian island of Lombok and less than two hours by fast boat to Bali, this has been the refrain to all my questions about the environment. Marine conservation? Garbage collection? Saving horses from neglect and abuse? Delphine. Delphine. And again, Delphine.
Delphine Robbe: the Gilis' green guardian
Robbe, 33, is director of the phenomenally successful Gili Eco Trust (GET). The embodiment of a tour de force, she has transformed a tiny group of volunteer marine sanctuary watchdogs into a highly influential and effective grassroots environmental organization. GET got off the ground, in 2001, by raising money from island dive shops to support local fisherman who wanted to patrol the waters against the newly illegal practice of dynamite fishing. Robbe’s arrival in 2006, however, brought a tidal wave of GET momentum.
Gili’s troubled waters
For the fish and coral, it wasn’t a moment too soon. This once-pristine tropical paradise faces a multitude of environmental challenges.
Lessons of soil conservation: preserving the Gilis for future generations
Coral reefs had been brutally bombed to provide construction materials for development (fueled by the rapid growth of tourism) and to give the increasing number of boats easy access to the shores. This uncontrolled growth also led to erosion and sewage pollution. Overfishing—both by dynamite and cyanide poisoning—was causing radical decline in stocks of multiple species.
Meanwhile, the impacts of global climate change were becoming fiercer, causing record levels of coral bleaching and destruction.
Diving into a challenge
Enter Robbe, a world-traveling backpacker. On Gili Trawangan—largest and most touristic of the three-island archipelago—she initially trained as a SCUBA diving instructor at Big Bubble Dive. There, shop owner Anna Walker, active in GET, inspired and encouraged Robbe to get involved in local environmental conservation.
“While teaching diving at Big Bubble and managing the business, I started working on a GET project with some friends and [local] stakeholders,” Robbe tells me during our interview in Bali one evening. “I wanted to give something back to that amazing place.”
Indeed, I think she’d make Santa blush at his relative stinginess. Robbe has unleashed a seemingly endless number of environmental initiatives, overcoming a host of cultural and bureaucratic roadblocks.
Three years into it, in 2009, her efforts hit an even quicker stride when she cleared the language barrier hurdle too, becoming fluent in Bahasa Indonesia. “I was never good at languages,” she says in perfect, if slightly French-accented English. “But now that I can communicate in their language, the Indonesians trust me more, and I can explain issues and concerns much more clearly.” Moments later, she orders dinner in what appears to be flawless Indonesian.
Gili dive shop détente
Pay for release: a leopard shark goes free
Much of GET’s success derives from unparalleled cooperation by the 14 dive shops operating on ‘Gili T’ (as Trawangan is known locally)—a competitive détente to protect their shared environment. All have agreed to assess their customers an annual fee of 50,000 rupiah (about US$5). Today, that translates into a monthly operating budget for GET of nearly US$4,000, a huge sum in a country where, in 2008, the average annual income per capita was less than a tenth of that.
“We’re now the island’s largest funder of environmental and social welfare projects,” Robbe says, which allows them flexibility and reach that’s rare among non-profit organizations. In one innovative project, GET pays 13 fisherman families about six million rupiah per month notto overfish.
Success, of course, presents its own challenges. “Last week, a fisherman purposefully caught a leopard shark and brought it to me, knowing that I’d pay to have it released,” Robbe laments with a barely controlled look of disgust. Then she shows me pictures of a bloodied manta ray which she paid to have released a month before.
Rebuilding Gili’s reefs
GET’s most successful initiative to date has been reef restoration, building so-called constructed reefs to revitalize coral and fish populations, then patrolling, placing mooring buoys and organizing garbage clean-up days around these “reef incubators.” Conservation and restoration of fragile coral reefs—a critical component of marine biodiversity restoration—are a top priority for conservationists and the environmentally savvy tourism sector.
Coral: dead from climate change and human abuse
Around the world, significant changes in water temperatures have caused reefs to die off from “coral bleaching.” In some aquatic wonderlands, such as the Maldives or Malaysia, more than 70% of coral has died. Here in the Java Sea, the dead coral remnants scattered along the beaches and littering the sea floor are primarily the result of the deliberate blasting to extract building materials. Dead coral crumbles away, and injured coral grows back excruciatingly slowly (2-6 cm/year—about 0.75”–2.5”).
New coral’s best chance of long-term survival rests on a solid infrastructure on which to grow, and that’s where the underwater scaffolding of these constructed reefs comes into play.
BioRock on … and on and on
Biorock 2010: building new reefs worldwide
Robbe’s first project in 2006 was to organize an international workshop on coral reef restoration, which has since grown under her leadership and continued every two years. The 4th Gili T conference, planned for November 2012, is expected to draw more than 100 attendees, including formerly skeptical Indonesian government officials, engineers, dive professionals, marine biologists, environmentalists, lawyers and global experts on marine conservation.
At that inaugural 2006 event, Robbe teamed with the Global Coral Reef Alliance and an international team of scientists, engineers and even artists to prototype BioRock, an artificial reef system that creates underwater habitat for corals (and lots of fish). BioRock reefs are made from welded metal rods—often in creative shapes—that are connected to a super-low electrical current.
The resulting electrolysis produces a thick layer of calcium carbonate, the perfect substrate on which to regenerate the broken-off pieces of coral that divers collect from the sea bottom, then tie to the structures. As a marine habitat, results are nearly instantaneous. Fish arrive within minutes. Because of the tiny electrical charge, coral on BioRock grows 2–6 times faster than normal.
Octopus’s gardens in the shade
British artist and scuba-diving enthusiast Celia Gregoryis on a mission to create an underwater Burning Man-style wonderland of fantastic, large-scale sculptures along Bali’s shores—therein providing food and shelter for Nemo, Sponge Bob and all their aquatic buddies.
The Coral Goddess: art reef
Already weakened by indiscriminate cyanide and dynamite fishing, waters warming from global climate change literally cook the coral, bleaching it to death until it crumbles. The once-thriving coral forests have been transformed into desolate maritime moonscapes. Corals re-grow slowly, and require a solid physical foundation on which to latch so that sea currents don’t simply wash them away into a murky oblivion.
On the northwest coast of Bali, near the fishing village of Pemuteran, Gregory recently completed construction and installation of the Coral Goddess, an underwater avatar of refuge that provides a new home for once-thriving species of hard corals. Elsewhere off the shores of Bali and the nearby Gili Islands, Biorock manta rays, dolphins and a host of other constructed iron icons anchor the sea floors.
The BioRock technique, of course, requires constant electrical current to enhance growth rates (“a bit like humans taking vitamins,” explains Gregory). Rather than relying on electricity cables strung from the shore to transmit dirty energy from the grid, Gregory powers her Goddess with two photovoltaic panels and a small wind turbine.
Gregory’s vision, however, stretches far beyond reef restoration. She intends her artistic creations to inspire a new wave of environmental awareness through eco-tourism, creating underwater Hollywood-style sets for shooting film, commercials, fashion shoots, even weddings. “I am exploring the underwater world as a creative arena,” Gregory says. “By nurturing, not exploiting, creating gardens which restore life and reintroduce aquatic diversity.”—M.S. Coral Goddess photo © Imran Ahmad
Robbe, the world’s only certified instructor in BioRock coral construction, has trained hundreds of volunteers. To date, 62 BioRock installations have been successfully created around the Gili Islands, with dozens more in the planning stages. The largest is a metallic-framed dome 40 feet in diameter with specially designed tunnels in which divers train to control their underwater buoyancy.
Not all her reef tales, Robbe points out, have happy endings. Despite being surrounded by protective moorings, one boat dropped anchor on the original BioRock dome, crushing a large section. Another BioRock structure was stolen. And some of her painstakingly revitalized coral itself is being choked to death by a bacterial sponge that’s fed by discharges of raw sewage from Gili T.’s mushrooming forest of hotels, restaurants and homes. These setbacks only spur her on.
What’s next for GET
Biorock: a reef grows in Gili's Java Sea
Land-based conservation is an increasing focus. Robbe wants to conduct a survey of all businesses, including a comprehensive assessment of septic systems. Her goal: enlist business-owner support and financing for more Gili conservation projects. Already, GET has purchased hundreds of garbage and recycling containers, coordinating pick-up with local collectors and recyclers in Lombok and Bali. To tackle the issue of shoreline erosion, she points again to the invaluable reef.
“Those huge holes in the coral shelf around Gili T which locals blasted have been causing horrible erosion—you can even see it clearly on Google Earth.” I didn’t doubt her word, but she insists on showing me the live images on her BlackBerry. “The erosion has intensified from this year’s unbelievably large storms.”
New coral growth: electric thrill
After conferring with scientists and engineers, GET is planning to plug these reef holes. First, Robbe says, they’ll pilot a new technique for rebuilding reefs, using rubble-filled Gortex sacks to fill the trenches in the reef barrier. With an experimental combination of Gortex and Biorock technologies, they’ll create wave-breakers to reduce the erosion-causing intensity of the crashing waves. They’ll provide the necessary low-current electricity with a custom-designed, underwater wave-powered generator. Finally, GET will build a pier so that boats can dock safely beyond the coral shelf. Oh yes, they’ll also be expanding an erosion-preventing native plant project along the crumbling shores.
GET-ing Gili’s future
Robbe truly believes Gili’s coral has a fighting chance. But there’s so much yet to do.…
Delphine's clinic: a hero to horses, too
“More eco-activists need to get involved,” she declares. She is GET’s only full-time employee. Foreign volunteers, while plentiful and helpful, don’t stick around very long. But volunteers do continue to arrive, with no dearth of new projects to harness their talents.
High on Robbe’s own to-do list: Local transport and animal welfare. As a longtime equestrian, she wants to improve the health of the villagers’ horses, which are the only means of supply transport on these automobile- and motorcycle-free islands. “Local wells are mostly contaminated with sewage and sea water, causing horses to die from kidney failure when they’re only a few years old.” With local support, she now conducts horse-health clinics.
Riding the waves
At the rate she’s diving into new projects, you’d never guess that Robbe is recovering from skin cancer surgery. “My father died when he was 33 years old,” Robbe confides. “But I’m just getting started.” I think it’s a safe bet that it will take more than a little brush with cancer to slow down Delphine Robbe, a seemingly unstoppable green hero.—Michael Straus, Contributing Editor
Atlantis Divers: greening Bali’s blue waters
With Bali awash in scuba-dive shops (200+ with new ones surfacing every year), Atlantis International Bali—with a deep commitment to preserving Indonesia’s tropical marine paradise—swims in a league of its own.
Atlantis: undersea garbage haul
Atlantis is certified by PADI, the world’s largest scuba-diving training association, which provides materials and training to teach instructors and customers how to protect the underwater environment.
Entering the Atlantis shop in Sanur, I was welcomed with a flurry of activity. Marine biologist Jansi Sartin, who runs Reef Check Indonesia, was preparing to give an educational seminar to gathering dive instructors about monitoring coral health. Project AWARE posters on the walls encourage divers to participate in a World Oceans Day underwater garbage clean-up, which was being held the very next day.
Listening to AIB’s Marie Chau rattle off the shop’s seemingly endless stream of environmental initiatives—from training divers to monitoring coral health and lobbying the government to protect sharks against brutal slaughter, to fundraisers, beach clean-ups and creating an environmental assessment report—I’m worried she’ll soon need breathing help from a compressed air tank to keep from hyperventilating. “We’re a small dive shop,” Marie concludes in a tone of genuine modesty. “We’re doing what we can.” Her boss, Atlantis owner Jerome Perrussel, adds, “We can’t expect other businesses or government to do anything. We have to make a personal effort ourselves.”
Alas, the next day Atlantis appears to be underwater dumpster diving alone; the stark lack of cooperation for the greater environmental good among Bali dive shops—so unlike those that have allied themselves with the Gili Eco Trust—appears incongruous in a sport requiring that every diver have a dive buddy. The world definitely needs more green heroes like Atlantis and Delphine Robbe to unite us in our ever-more urgent need to save the marine environment.—M.S.
