Relief for coral reefs
Relief for coral reefs
With the health of the oceans in acute danger, marine biologist Ulrike Pfreundt left her academic career to found a company dedicated to building and restoring tropical coral reefs.
ETH spin-off rrreefs is a company with a mission to regenerate one per cent of coastal reefs by 2034. To what extent is this a personal cause for you?
ULRIKE PFREUNDT – I’ve always been close to nature. I started out as a microbial oceanographer and spent a lot of time researching in the tropics. The more I learned about this environment, the more I realised how badly it’s doing. That really got to me. There’s even a term for this: environmental grief. So I decided to leave my academic career and devote myself fully to marine conservation. Together with three co-founders, I deliberately chose the start-up path because I wanted the challenge of developing a regenerative business model.
“Participatory processes and co-design with local communities are key to our success.”
What does that model look like?
Intact coral reefs are essential to healthy oceans: almost a third of all known organisms in the ocean depend on coral reefs, so their decline could severely impact marine ecosystems. Reefs also provide food, income and protection from coastal erosion for hundreds of millions of people. That’s where we come in – for example, with our regeneration project in Pujada Bay in the Philippines, which has been running for nearly two years. We’re now at the point of building our first local facility to 3D-print our reef modules. This significantly reduces production costs and creates value for the surrounding community. Thanks to support from the Fourfold Foundation, we’re able to train residents living in Pujada Bay, who are highly motivated to do something for their reef: they learn to dive, learn about our modular system, and take further training in scientific monitoring. This builds strong local teams. Participatory processes and co-design are key to this. We ask fishers, for instance, where a reef structure is most urgently needed to help the fish return. We would also like to involve these people who know their reefs very well to help with monitoring and enable them to have an alternative income to fishing. In this way, we’re factoring in the entire socio-ecological context and developing a model that can be adapted to other similar countries.
© Angela Alegria
How does rrreefs plan to make money?
We’re pursuing two business lines with which we’ve been generating revenue for two years: on the one hand, we work with companies that want to support ocean biodiversity as part of their corporate sustainability efforts or supply chain resilience. We offer a package consisting of implementation, monitoring, reporting and storytelling. On the other hand, we’re attractive to the tourism and hospitality industry. For resort owners, a dying reef is bad for business. We offer reef repairs and even entire reef structures. Regenerative experiences are booming in the tourism sector right now; we are developing programmes that allow hotel guests to contribute to building the reef.
You built your first artificial reef off the Colombian island of San Andrés. How is it doing almost four years later?
Recently, we saw a shark there for the first time – that was amazing! Less anecdotally, we can say that fish diversity and biomass are now comparable to the nearby natural reef, which is a good result. The coral has been growing more slowly than we’d hoped, probably due to frequent periods of extreme heat. It grows much faster in the Philippines! What’s great is that at every one of our reefs, every measuring point shows an increase in young corals, which means that there are more and more!
What do you say to the argument that fighting climate change should be our first priority if we want to stop coral reefs dying?
All of these solutions, including ours, won’t save coral reefs unless we tackle climate change at the same time. At some point, everything will die if it gets too hot. Our goal is to secure coral reefs in different places around the world for long enough that they can continue to exist in the long term. But the reefs are in such bad shape, emergency aid is needed right now.
How will you achieve your goal of regenerating 700 kilometres of reef structure by 2034?
We’ll get there if we manage to triple the area we regenerate each year. It’s ambitious, but not impossible. We’ll need local teams implementing projects in many different places at the same time. Simultaneously, we’re developing a strategy for industrialised countries, based on more automated processes. Our headquarters will remain in Zurich: on the one hand, we’re close to our clients, and on the other, close to the talent we need, particularly from ETH.
Your mission is a Herculean task – what keeps you optimistic?
We have an incredible community which constantly motivates us – and we celebrate small wins! I can also feel real momentum. More and more people care about the oceans and are working on solutions – we need every one of them!
Stocker Lab
rrreefs originated at the Department of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich, where Ulrike Pfreundt was a postdoctoral fellow from 2016 to 2020 in the group led by Professor Roman Stocker. Here, biologists collaborate with physicists, engineers and mathematicians to study how microbes and microscopic organisms shape marine ecosystems. The Stocker Lab receives funding from donors that include the Simons Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
