 You have probably heard about the world's coral reefs in the news lately. You've probably heard a scientist and conservationists Screaming hysterically not quite getting our messages that tactful And that's because the world's coral reefs as with the world's oceans are suffering We have many more ocean ecosystems right now that look less like this and more like this So when we as conservationists and scientists are screaming and asking and begging for conservation action We are motivated by this dramatic change that we've seen underwater But somehow our notion of conservation action rests in this absurd scale of Individuals making choices every day that will somehow save the planet like hang up your towel in your hotel bathroom because you'll save some gallons of water in the laundry or Reuse a plastic shopping bag because you'll save some plastic and some petroleum or my least favorite buy a new bag That brags about how you like to reuse bags when you go shopping Do we really think that? These actions are going to take ocean ecosystems that look like this and bring them back to this now those actions are Symbolic and they matter when integrated over societies But hanging up your hotel towel in the bathroom is not going to move this system back to this now I'm a coral reef biologist. I've been scuba diving for 20 years I've been living in the Caribbean and working there for I've been working there for 15 years I've been living there for four the reason I became a coral reef biologist is because I love corals I think they're hilarious. I think they're fascinating. I want to know what makes them work. What makes them grow They're beautiful, but when people ask me in taxis or airplanes Why should we care about coral reefs anyway? I say because they're worth a lot of money The world's coral reefs are worth an estimated trillion dollars a year And if you zoom out to the global oceans, the number is something like 30 trillion dollars a year Where is all that money? You're thinking in the audience, right? You're going wait a minute Where where is all that money? So what I want to try to describe to you today is where some of that wealth comes from What where we got those numbers? Focusing mostly on coral reefs but with a couple zoom in and out and then some of the threats to those Sources of wealth and then some examples of how science and technology are starting to reclaim and recapture and regrow those sources of wealth So let's start with Coastal protection There are 70% of the world's population lives within 150 miles of the shore Around the world in the tropics. We've built our lives up against the coastline Which makes sense because it's beautiful But that puts our lives our property at risk of storms and flooding and hurricanes and tsunamis and what that means is that we are trusting the ocean To keep us safe the ocean does in fact keep us safe and has historically because Ecosystems like coral reefs are natural buffers and barriers a coral reef offshore of an island can stop up to 97% of the energy in a wave That is astounding This something similar is true for things like mangroves and marshes and seagrass beds So when you decide to knock down a mangrove to build a hotel, that's a short term Gain and a long-term risk now unfortunately in the Caribbean We've started losing corals particularly in the last 50 years and some islands in the Caribbean have lost them very quickly Some places in the Caribbean lost them slowly and there's a few still holding on Typically in places with the best governance and the least corruption So we're losing those natural buffers and those natural barriers that are worth so much money a Slightly more obvious source of wealth in the ocean is fisheries The world's fisheries are worth something like 300 billion dollars per year And there are a billion people in the world who depend on marine wild fisheries for their primary source of protein Yet once again, we are failing to properly protect that about 20% of the value of the world's fisheries Is lost to what's called IUU fishing that's illegal unreported and unregulated and Particularly with our largest species we've eaten them almost down to extinction So now we have fishermen subsisting not on one big group or three big lobsters But taking the very last fish off the reef to help their families survive now This isn't just important for food security and for human dignity It's also important for national security because if you have a boat and fuel and no fish to catch and no Way to make money or feed your family. It's pretty convenient to go find other boats that do have money So the collapse of global fisheries is now a cause of the emergence of piracy in places like the Gulf of Aden and the Caribbean If you didn't care about the oceans before I hope it's starting to kick in one more source of value in the World's oceans particularly in coral reefs is tourism Scuba tourism alone it can be worth one to ten million dollars per year even for a small island or a small country Now that tourism depends on clean clear water that's safe to swim in yet as we add Fertilizer and sewage and sediment to the ocean what we get is not an ocean free of pathogens But an ocean full of pathogens. This is a microbiological plate of the bacteria that caused cholera We now see antibiotic resistant bacteria in the near shore waters by coral reefs for which we have few Or no antibiotics to treat So we're talking about human health We're asking tourists to come give us money to keep our ecosystems our economies to keep our economies going and yet We're asking them to swim in pathogens So it used to be if you got cut your grandmother would say go into the ocean the ocean will help you Heal the wound and help clean it out and now there are places in the world where it's not even safe to go in the water at all Given all of those sources of wealth given all of that value and given those threats toward it What are some of the things that scientists and conservationists are doing to try to recover and protect and restore that wealth? I'll give you four examples Focusing mostly on coral reefs, but we'll mix it up a little bit One of the things we're doing is trying to help coral reefs recover in a more hands-on way It used to be you made a marine protective area and you just tried and hoped that the corals would grow back But now we're trying to capture the whole process of coral reproduction and do basically assisted reproduction for those coral species And our vision is that someday instead of just waiting for corals to grow back We can start to plant them and grow them like you would a vegetable garden in your backyard So we do that by finding out when these corals reproduce catching their eggs growing their eggs in the lab And just swimming larvae and then figuring out how to get those larvae to go through the settlement process and attach and Metamorphose and this coral here is an endangered species that my lab raised for the first time No one had ever seen a juvenile of this species until we did it a couple of years ago So we're trying to do assisted reproduction like you would for in vitro fertilization But for the world's coral reefs and we're trying to enhance that with newer technologies in science like searching for probiotic bacteria that help them survive better Testing to see if we can find the cue molecules that trigger them to settle and attach and Trying to design new surfaces that tempt them to settle and attach and protect them after they've attached better than natural surfaces Now this is all still early stage We sometimes feel like the first person who ever tried to plant a tomato seed in South America and get it to turn into a tomato plant It's working though We've have proof of principle that we can actually get corals through this whole process and we can get the juveniles to grow So now our challenge is to scale that up to the vegetable garden scale and give us a more active way of restoring these Coral reef ecosystems now of course those organisms need safe water to live in and yet We continue as a society to dump millions of gallons of sewage straight into the ocean this sewage pipe in Florida deposits about 50,000 50 million liters of sewage into the water in Florida every day. This is absurd We had a wonderful comment yesterday in a workshop. This isn't wastewater waste is a resource out of place This is nitrogen. This is carbon. This is vitamins This is a resource and we're simply dumping it in the ocean and letting it fuel pathogenic bacteria when instead we could be using it to Grow algae which we could then use to grow fish So these sorts of wastewater-fed aquaculture systems are actually quite common in Southeast Asia But the rest of the world kind of forgot this was an option and only now is this technology being adopted back by large aquaculture companies as a way of closing the loop instead of taking a resource and sending it straight onto the ocean where it causes problems We're now closing the loop and using it to grow more fish and these fish farms in places like Calcutta in China in Vietnam they can supply up to 40% of the fish that are even consumed in a city simply by closing the loop locally Now let's get more high-tech because this is the fourth industrial revolution This organism is called a crown of thorn starfish It eats coral tissue and it's a major threat in Australia on the Great Barrier Reef Now one of the reasons it has gone through such a population boom lately is Because of the poor agricultural practices in Australia runoff nutrients fertilizer sediment have been blamed for the rise of this organism now when a group of scuba divers tries to go remove this from the reef they are Limited by their dive depth their air in their tank and if you cut this in half it grows into two starfish so it's not exactly the easiest thing to remove enter new technology the Queensland University of Technology invented a Immersable that uses computer vision to find these starfish on the reef Identify them and inject them with saline and kill them in place This is an example of how we're going from completely hands-off conservation to hands-on using Machines to do things that we can't in the landscape of conservation one more example of Conservation technology at a much bigger scale in the island nation of Palau Palau is leading the way in marine conservation having set up a shark sanctuary Participated in the Micronesia challenge to put 30% of their oceans into conservation areas and then last year said you know what? Let's go big they put 80% of their to rest their waters into no take zones no mining no fishing and all the way out to the 200 mile easy their exclusive economic zone their marine protected areas the size of California now How would you enforce your fisheries rule in a body of water the size of California in the world of conservation? We used to think that was impossible virtually impossible and why would you even bother making a marine protected area that big? Well Palau worked with a number of different tech companies and NGOs to set up a satellite system to enforce their fisheries regulations So last year they turned on a system that uses satellites to track boats track their behavior uses lidar scanning uses night photography They can find boats they can tell by patterns what they're fishing for they can tell by their registration whether they're doing it illegally And then they can send enforcement out to intercept the illegal fishermen Now just to be sure the world heard this shot over the bow Recently they caught a group of illegal fishing vessels They made sure all the humans were taken off safely on board and then they showed just how they feel about people fishing in their protected waters This is a new world of conservation. We are able to Maintain the property rights of countries of cities of governments using technology And that's going to make a huge difference in our ability to manage stocks of fish and other ocean resources that move between domains So I hope that I've convinced you that the ocean is Important to us not because it's pretty not just because it's pretty but because it's worth a bunch of money Coral reefs are worth a trillion dollars a year global fisheries hundreds of billions the entire ocean tens of trillions But there's one more value that I haven't mentioned yet And that's one of the most intriguing and we're going to see that become increasingly important in the coming years And that's the use of organisms in the ocean to discover new sources of medicine So this is a molecule that was discovered in Kurosawa a few years ago that shows strong activity against cancer One of the reasons the ocean is such a good place to find new medicines is because this biodiversity of organisms means there's a biodiversity of chemicals So it's incredibly important that we preserve that Biodiversity as a whole because we're not done looking through all those chemicals I hope that I've convinced you that conservation isn't about just hanging up a towel in a hotel bathroom Conservation is about acting at scales that matter for governments and for societies as part of his final Acts as a president none other than George W. Bush helped establish the Marine National Monument in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands it's now called the Papahanao Mokuakea Marine National Monument and Obama is now considering extending that Marine National Park to our 200 mile Exclusive economic zone in the past it may not have even made sense to do given there was almost no way to enforce it But now we can enforce it I was at a coral reef biology conference last week and there was concern about the state of coral reefs But more excitement about this Marine National Monument than there was doom and gloom about the state of things There is a sea change the ship is starting to steer in a different direction So I'd like to ask the next time you're in a hotel bathroom and you're thinking about whether or not to hang up Your towel or not who cares Do whatever you want But as you make that choice think about whether you as a country a company a Society are making choices at the centimeter scale or making choices at the scale of thousands of kilometers Thank you very much