Coral reefs are not just a beautiful sight to behold. They are living, breathing ecosystems that support a vast array of marine life. Despite covering only 1% of the sea floor, coral reefs are responsible for 25% of all marine life. They also play a crucial role in protecting coastal areas and providing employment opportunities to thousands of people in the fishing and tourism industries.

Nevertheless, coral reefs worldwide are currently under threat. The World Resource Institute projects that local human activity, global warming, and ocean acidification will threaten over 90% of the world’s reefs by the 2030s.

Plastic pollution is among the greatest threats to coral reefs, particularly concerning coral disease. According to a study conducted by Lamb et al., published in the Journal of Science, they observed that the prevalence of infection in corals was merely 4% in the absence of any interaction with plastic debris. However, introducing plastic to the reef significantly increased the disease rate, reaching an alarming 89%, representing a twenty-fold escalation.

PADI AWARE Week is an annual event dedicated to raising awareness about the importance of ocean conservation and taking action to protect our marine environment. In this week-long event, AquaMarine Diving – Bali, fortunate to celebrates with various activities such as a clean-up event, Webinar, School Visit, and Conservation Education.

On 19 September 2023, AMD-B kicked off the PADI Aware Week with beach and underwater clean-up. The clean-up event was a tremendous success, with volunteers coming together to remove the debris from the coast and the ocean. Seeing the dedication and passion people contribute to protecting our marine environment is heartening. As usually we are hosting our monthly clean-up at every 4th, now we thrilled invited some of our partners and friends to be involved in our AWARE Week Clean-up event, namely:
– Coral Restoration Partner, Livingseas
– PADI Regional Manager, Neil Davidson
– Simone Tomazela
– Topi Inn Staffs

In this clean-up event, we successfully collected 13.48 kgs and 17.44 kgs of debris from the coast and our adopted site, The Jetty and The Mushroom Point. The clean-up event plays a crucial role in safeguarding the health and well-being of marine life. By removing trash, we are creating a cleaner and healthier ocean for all living creatures.

For most scuba divers it is self-evident we should be concerned by what we are facing beneath our oceans. As ocean users, the least we can do is be responsible for ensuring our behaviour has minimum negative impact and follows eco-friendly practices. The ‘Climate Change Crisis’ is very high on the list of priorities AND everyone is able to makes changes anytime, anywhere.

Why are scuba divers boldly geared up to be Ocean Ambassadors?

1. Coral is the most diverse, complex, rich, and valuable ecosystem which also contributes an enormous amount of oxygen (a lot more than trees) and supports our life resources.
2. Divers have the privilege of exploring the underwater realm. Despite the fact we can’t control what other people do, we can demonstrate to non-divers who cannot see the ugly journey of our waste. Over and above, human destructive behaviour always ends up using the ocean as their landfill.
3. Divers are witnesses of how our planet is becoming devastated. When the ocean is destroyed, it will give domino effect to our daily life, it also applies in vice versa. What scuba divers see, and pass on, helps the public to understand and visualise what we shouldn’t do AND what we can do to help our planet.

This century’s technological sophistication help us to simplify into intelligible information for the public by using social media.

The ‘ocean issues’ divers mostly find are:
– Coral cover degradation,
– Ocean destructive waste,
– Diminutive biodiverse fishes.
These are the indicators where we can see how powerfully land activity impacts coastal areas.