reefs

Coral reef restoration in Tanzania

The Ropes of Hope works for coral reef restoration in the Mafia Island marine park, off Tanzania. Instead of scuba diving to see shrinking reefs, we got involved with a project regrowing them. It’s the brainchild of Jean de Villiers, a South African molecular biologist who talked my teenagers through the underwater coral gene bank research and community involvement. Our ocean-view tree house accommodation didn’t hurt, with hot chocolate and cake hoisted up fresh each morning. In an educational U-turn, our eldest now studies sustainable development – Jean is doing something right.

Claire

Rewilding in the Scottish Highlands

Trees for Life, founded 40 years ago, is a rewilding project aiming to restore the glorious Caledonian forest across the Scottish Highlands. Typical volunteer weeks involve groups of up to 10 adults staying in bothies where you live and cook together and spend days on tasks such as planting, monitoring wildlife, surveying vegetation and maintenance work. They take place in some of the most beautiful and remote locations in the Highlands such as Glen Affric, one of the largest wild native forests in the UK where my partner and I spent a week we’ve never forgotten. There’s no wifi or fancy frills but a life-changing opportunity to work and live in a truly wild and beautiful part of Scotland, make new friends and feel your body and mind respond to hard but vital work.

Cal

Closer to nature in the Netherlands

The Holenberg forest in a remote corner of the Netherlands is the gateway to the Maashorst nature reserve, where I stayed in a Cabin Anna – an eco-aware experience that is as much an ethos as it is accommodation. Tucked away among a canvas of trees, heather and wetlands, the focus of these self-sufficient woodland cabins is on reducing man’s negative impact on the landscape, from the bed linen to the recycled waste-product cups, knives and forks. The simple wooden cabins are candlelit and sleep two – outside nights on the terrace gazing at stars are encouraged. You can hire bikes or hike through the forest to explore, including seeing and sensitively interacting with cows, goats, sheep and bison to enhance awareness of the natural world.

April

A buzzy experience in Italy’s South Tirol

Thanks to a stay at the Rinner Hotel in the South Tirol, my young teenagers and I discovered the generous contribution that bees make to our planet in terms of life, sustainability and conservation. Everything at this family-run Alpine hotel is centred on apiculture and the bee. There is an api wellness experience, including the inhalation of healthy beehive air while listening to the meditative buzzing of bees, hands-on sessions, beekeeping courses and a delicious dining menu of organic honeys – including a gala honey feast, with each course connected to sweet nectar produced on site. All electricity is generated from waste wood products that would have been thrown away, and the food, including organic wheat and barley, all comes from the green fields of the South Tyrol. My wife said I came back as a more relaxed, cooperative, sweeter person – a fine compliment to the bees.

Nigel

Walking with rhinos in Uganda

At Uganda’s Ziwa Rhino and Wildlife Ranch, conservation comes with mud, nerves and a very wet ending. Our guide, SP, treated rhino trekking like a game: he was captain, and victory meant spotting three rhinos. Walking silently along the winding “rhino highway”, we encountered mothers and calves just 25ft away, watching them graze in the wild. Ziwa is Uganda’s only place to see wild rhinos, part of a project to restore these endangered giants. SP called their favourite muddy wallow and salt lick the “rhino supermarket”. We even found the alpha male. Then the heavens opened. Game won; dryness lost!

Roy

Swap plastic for cat food in Montenegro

Last summer, while exploring Kotor, Montenegro, a local person’s recommendation led me to a cat park just inside the Old Town’s North Gate. In this quiet corner, sun-drowsy cats sprawled across the warm ground, while mischievous kittens tumbled over one another. Beside them, a curious recycling machine offered an irresistible exchange: feed it empty plastic bottles in exchange for cat food for the town’s feline residents. After collecting my plastic waste for a week, I brought it here, a simple way to give something back to Kotor.

Lucy

Wild spaces teeming with life in Kent

We love Elmley Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent for its remote, windswept landscapes and the long, seemingly barren stretches of land that are in fact teeming with life. One of my favourite memories is getting out and about at dusk, listening to the little owls hoot to one another as the gloom closes in. There’s something special about being somewhere so exposed and yet quiet, surrounded by owls (and other wildlife) going about their own lives. Elmley makes you slow down, pay attention and realise that even the emptiest-looking landscape is full of life.

Matt

Winning tip: a sea turtle hospital in Calabria, Italy

We spent September bicycle touring in Sicily and Calabria and one of the highlights was a few days in Brancaleone, a typical Italian working town. We visited the Sea Turtle Recovery Centre in the old railway station. The centre is manned entirely by volunteers and since 2006 they have rescued and rehabilitated more than 700 turtles. The staff are enthusiastic, friendly and informative. They charge a small entry fee and it’s by appointment only, but it is a joy to visit.

Anne

The world authority on threatened wildlife classified 96 percent of all coral reef systems as “critically endangered”.

Almost all of the world’s shallow-water coral reefs face an extremely high risk of collapse in the next 50 years, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has warned in a new global assessment.

In a report released on Thursday, the world authority on threatened wildlife classified 96 percent of the planet’s coral reef systems as “critically endangered”, its highest risk category, with total extinction possible by 2075.

“The future threat of climate change is looming and severe, and that poses a very high risk to the survival of these ecosystems,” said Mishal Gudka, scientific lead of the IUCN Red List of Coral Reef Ecosystems assessment.

Corals are heat-sensitive and particularly vulnerable to human-driven climate change, which is warming the world’s oceans and increasing the frequency and intensity of damaging bleaching events.

When a reef collapses, hard corals disappear and are replaced by algae, rubble and sponges. As a result, the reef no longer supports a diverse ecosystem that can include everything from tiny invertebrates to reef fish like grouper.

The emergence this year of a “super” El Nino, the natural warming phenomenon, also presents a risk to corals, Gudka said at a news conference at the UN’s COP17 biodiversity summit in Yerevan, Armenia.

It’s the latest dose of bad news for coral reefs, which are critical sources for seafood and tourism and often serve as buffers against coastal erosion and storms.

Sometimes dubbed “rainforests of the sea”, they have some of the world’s richest biodiversity and support a quarter of marine species as well as coastal communities and businesses.

Most of the world’s famous reef systems – including the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the Coral Triangle in the Western Pacific Ocean and Southeast Asia, the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System and the Red Sea coral reefs – are critically endangered, according to the assessment.

Elevated risk of extinction

For its report, the IUCN used the “middle-of-the-road” scenario from the UN’s panel of climate experts that projects global temperatures rising 2.7C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

Its analysis examined 127 tropical and subtropical coral systems covering 188,362 square kilometres.

A week ago, another IUCN study in the journal Nature found that nearly 44 percent of reef-building coral species face an elevated risk of extinction due to climate change. A year ago, a survey found that harmful bleaching of the world’s coral had grown to include 84 percent of the ocean’s reefs, the most intense of its kind in recorded history.

Despite its warning, the IUCN said coral reefs in most parts of the world “are not yet lost”.

“Coral reefs have shown a remarkable ability to bounce back from devastating bleaching events,” said Gudka. “Pockets of surviving, resilient coral reefs can still remain in the future, so we must do everything within our reach to set them up for success.”