In peril: A man fishes in a seagrass meadow damaged by sand mining in the Pari Islands, north of Jakarta.(Courtesy of Wawan Kiswara)

Seagrass meadows in the country are turning into muddy wastelands as they are under widespread threat from human activities and are often overlooked in conservation, putting the fisheries industry in peril.

Seagrass helps keep oceans clean, protects sandy beaches and increasingly helps to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

Loss of seagrass has been documented in places such as Lombok in West Nusa Tenggara, Manado in North Sulawesi, Wakatobi in Southeast Sulawesi and the Pari Islands, north of Jakarta, according to a group of Indonesian and UK scientists.

“Pollution is the biggest problem for seagrass in Indonesia,” Swansea University marine ecologist Richard Unsworth told The Jakarta Post, in reference to the country’s many polluted seas.

“What that means is that there’s no light for seagrass [as a result of pollution] because it’s essentially a plant that has adapted to living in the sea,” Unsworth said.

The second biggest threat for seagrass is coastal development. “So when people build houses on the seafront or claim lands to build ports or new development, this has a big impact upon seagrass,” he said.

In the Pari Islands, for instance, seagrass is being destroyed so that people can construct houses where the seagrass meadow use to be.

The third problem is overfishing, which significantly causes imbalances in the marine ecosystem. All these problems are killing seagrass meadows across the archipelago.

“Seagrass supports biodiversity and traps a lot of CO2 [carbon dioxide] from the ocean. Algae doesn’t do those things. So if the algae becomes dominant, it’s no longer a productive ecosystem,” said Unsworth.

By trapping emissions, he said seagrass meadows were important in mitigating the impacts of climate change because a large meadow of seagrass could trap a lot more CO2 than a forest and could store carbon in sediment, making seagrass more important than many forest types. The country has an estimated total seagrass area of 30,000 square kilometers, which potentially can harness 368.5 million metric tons of CO2.

Besides its benefit to the environment, seagrass meadows are also an important national resource that provides support for fisheries, according to Hasanuddin University researcher Rohani Ambo-Rappe.

“Indonesia is the world’s biggest fish producing nation and seagrass is critically important for supporting fisheries because baby fish live in seagrass and many types of fish spend their early years in seagrass as well. Healthy seagrass means healthy fisheries,” said Rohani.

Realizing that the nation’s seagrass meadows are in peril, a group of seagrass experts led by researchers at Swansea University, Cardiff University and Hasanuddin University recently gathered in Makassar, South Sulawesi, to collect evidence of the current status of seagrass, survey risks and develop conservation solutions.

It was the first time such evidence has ever been collated. The evidence highlights that action is urgently required to minimize damage to seagrass and to make them resilient to rapid and global environmental change.

Conservation management strategies are required to address specific threats to seagrass, which then can be implemented across the archipelago.

For example, seaweed farming can be conducted in deeper waters away from seagrass where water clarity is higher, increasing seaweed growth. Furthermore, coastal development needs to operate in a manner sensitive to the local habitat and illegal sand mining on important beaches needs to be policed.

“The government in Indonesia can start by recognizing the importance of seagrass. It’s not just Indonesia’s problem, it’s a global problem.

“One billion people on the planet live within 50 km from seagrass meadows but most of those people don’t know that,” Unsworth said.

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