If it was Helen of Troy’s face that, famously, launched one thousand ships, then what’s to say of the celebrated environmental scientist, Dr Jane Goodall whose kiss upon a single coral, last week, marked the launch of Singapore’s ‘most extensive restoration project to date’ – an ambitious initiative to plant 100,000 corals over the course of the next ten years?

Known as the 100k Corals Initiative, this is a major scale-up of all local coral restoration efforts that have come before it, as the National Parks Board of Singapore sets its sights on restoring the resilience of local coral communities and reefs within local waters between now and 2034.

A project so big it has caught the attention of one of the world’s preeminent nature conservation and environmental researchers, Dr Jane Goodall – the founder of the Dr Jane Goodall Foundation – who was made guest of honour as crowds gathered at the National Parks Board of Singapore’s Marine Park Outreach and Education Centre to witness its launch.

Carrying out a ‘ceremonial’ kissing of the coral, Dr Goodall marked the launch of the initiative which will now lean on the research held at the Education Centre  on St John’s Island where some 100,000 corals will now be cultivated before being transplanted into local marine environments to restore degraded reefs or establish new coral communities. 

This cultivation of corals will be carried out at the facility by coral restoration experts and researchers from the National University of Singapore at St John’s Island National Marine Laboratory as part of the campaign all made possible by $2 million (Singapore) in funding made available by local businesses.

Among the project’s benefactors is Delta Electronics, a local business whose specialism in smart technology will be leveraged to supply the facility with state of the art technologies, including lighting, temperature, water quality, and water flow smart tech, to aid with growing healthy coral under controlled conditions.

By growing them in tanks, the corals will be able to thrive without being subject to environmental stressors such as ocean warming and acidification. Researchers will work to cultivate several species of coral, some of which are under National Parks Board’s (NParks) Species Recovery Programme. These include the staghorn coral (Acropora digitifera) and plate acropora coral (Acropora millepora).

Guests of the launch event – which included Dr Goodall alongside Singapore’s minister for national development, Desmond Lee – were invited to take part in a coral planting activity at the coral culture facility.

Serving as an ex-situ coral nursery, the coral culture facility will house six tanks that can rear up to 600 coral nubbins each. The nubbins – which are small coral fragments produced from adult colonies – will be attached to a specially designed frame that maximises the number of corals that can be grown in the tanks and under controlled conditions.

Once these nubbins have grown large enough, they will be transplanted onto degraded reefs for restoration purposes, or inserted into other areas to establish new coral communities. 

The coral culture facility is targeted to be fully operational and open to the public in the first half of the new year. 

Corals are recognised as a keystone reef-building animal that supports a marine ecosystem and an estimated one-quarter of marine species dependent on healthy reefs to survive. Coral reefs are also a potential nature-based solution to help mitigate the impacts of climate change, serving as a natural defence against shoreline erosion while providing habitats for a rich array of marine biodiversity.

Speaking with Channel News Asia, Mr Lee said that climate change and human action pose a significant threat to Singapore’s coral reefs, adding that coral bleaching is “happening a lot more frequently” pointing to the fourth global coral bleaching event, the second in the last decade.

The minister said that while Singapore has taken steps to conserve its coral reefs, such as monitoring them for signs of bleaching, local efforts can “do much more to ensure the long-term survival of our reefs.”

Not to miss the chance while conservation royalty was in the house, the event handed the floor to Dr Goodall who gave a brief talk on collective efforts towards marine conservation, punctuated with a tender moment that was quite literally the kiss to launch one-hundred thousand polyps.

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