Coral reefs in Vietnam face collapse – can conservation efforts turn the tide?

Coral reefs are visible off the coast of Nha Trang

The gentle waves off the coast of central Vietnam’s Nha Trang obscure an open secret: The life-giving coral reefs below are dying. The waters are eerily devoid of fish. The bounty of the ocean is coming to an end.

This is why Binh Van — who fished in these waters for over two decades — now charters his boat to Vietnamese tourists wanting to experience the thrill of fishing in the deep waters of the South China Sea. But there is only squid, which is flourishing in oceans warmed by climate change, to catch. His passengers don’t mind as the boat moves away from Nha Trang’s twinkling beach resorts. But Van is pensive.

It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when he’d catch 70 kilograms of fish, like tuna and grouper, in one night. He can’t make money on the squid.

“Now I usually go home empty-handed,” he said.

Southeast Asia’s coral reefs make up over a third of the world’s coral reefs and are part of the ‘Coral Triangle’, a richly biodiverse marine area that generally stretches from the Philippines to Indonesia to the Solomon Islands. But most of these are now at risk of being destroyed. Only 1% of Vietnam’s reefs are still healthy, and in those cases it’s because of their remoteness, according to the World Resources Institute.

Reefs at risk worldwide

Reefs worldwide are at risk from warmer and more acidic waters that weaken coral reefs and result in them bleaching because they’ve expelled the algae that helps them survive. Bleached corals need time to recover but bleaching events — when many corals lose color at the same time — are happening more frequently because of climate change, said Clint Oakley, who studies corals at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

“It’s a compounding problem. It takes more than a year for them to fully recover,” he said.

The coral reefs of Nha Trang have also had to contend with local pressures as Vietnam’s economy boomed and coastal towns grew. Sediment from construction harms corals. Runoff from agriculture, sewage and booming aquaculture trigger algal blooms that block sunlight and choke corals. Intense overfishing killed off fishes that support reef health. By 2019, an outbreak of a predatory, thorny starfish — made likelier because of the reef’s disturbed ecological balance — had killed nearly 90% by eating corals of the surviving reefs by 2019, said Konstantin S. Tkachenko, a professor of marine ecology at Russia’s Samara University who has been studying Vietnam’s reefs for years.

This has affected not only the local fishing industry — reefs provide food, shelter, and breeding grounds for fish — but also Vietnam’s tourism industry, especially among divers from all over the world who flock to the Southeast Asian country because of its long coastline. The underwater landscape is becoming infamous for different types of waste: Glass bottles where revelers party, nylon fishing lines where fishing boats lurk and plastic everywhere. Fish that clean reefs and keep them healthy by eating algae or parasites, like the distinctive Picasso triggerfish and the beaked Indian parrotfish, have disappeared, said Michael Blum of Rainbow Divers, a diving company in Vietnam.

“When you don’t have the cleaners, the (reefs) suffocate,” he said.

He and others have been diving every Friday to collect waste since October, bringing up more than 100 kilograms of trash.

Niecey Alexander, a tourist who began diving in December, said that it wasn’t until she was underwater that she realized how small the world above water is compared to the vast ocean and the life it sustains. After her first dive to collect waste she said that it was mostly from tourism. “People not really thinking about waste when they’re going into these adventures,” she said.

Tourism and reefs hand-in-hand

Tourism and reefs can go hand in hand if they’re well-managed, said Emma Camp, a coral expert at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. She said that there are instances of tourism supporting marine conservation and programs to help reefs recover. But unsustainable tourism practices — too many people, or people doing things like dropping their anchors on the reefs — can cause harm.

“They can be very positive for an area, allowing people to fall in love with a reef by allowing them to experience it firsthand,” she said.

Preserving the tourism brochure image of its natural beauty will be crucial for Vietnam as it tries to compete with its neighbors to boost post-pandemic revenue from tourism to $42 billion. It wants to attract 23 million international tourists and over 120 million visits by domestic tourists in 2025. For context, the region’s most popular destination, Thailand, wants 40 million international visitors and 200 million domestic visits in 2025.

And in cities like Nha Trang, its long stretches of golden sand beaches and traditional fishing villages now coexist with the rapid construction of resorts, restaurants and bars.

Vietnam insists that it is making efforts to make tourism sustainable. In 2001, it established 160 square kilometers (61 square miles) of land and water as its first protected marine area. But problems have persisted, from destructive practices that used explosives or poison to excessive tourism and coastal construction, said Vietnamese state media. In 2022, local authorities paused tourism to give the reef time to recover while removing predatory starfish and cleaning the seabed. The government has also approved a coral nursery project to support the recovery of the ecosystem.

But even though a marine patrol was established to protect the waters to ensure that fishermen don’t enter the marine park, Blum said fishing in the protected area was continuing.

“We go out in the morning, we are chasing the fishing boats away. We leave in the afternoon, and the fishing boats are coming back in,” Blum said.

Tkachenko, the Russian scientist, said the Southeast Asian country could do more to protect them. It could create more marine parks where protections are actually enforced, obligate the tourism industry to restore vegetation on the coasts to reduce sediment pouring into the ocean, restore degraded reefs through coral culture and by introducing animals that balance reef ecosystems, and regulating fisheries.

He pointed to the scores of fishing vessels that dot the coasts of Nha Trang.

“What do you think is the chance to survive for any tiny fish or sea bottom inhabitant under such tremendous fishing pressure daily?” he said. YANNICK PETERHANS & ANIRUDDHA GHOSAL, NHA TRANG, MDT/AP