KARACHI — From the sands of Manjhaar Beach on the far outskirts of Karachi, Pakistan, an island is just visible 10 kilometers, about 6 miles, offshore. Mist rising from the Arabian Sea often shrouds Churna Island from the view of sailors and tourists heading toward it for fishing or diving. Below the waves, the island harbors one of Pakistan’s biodiversity hotspots: a diverse coral community, including one of the country’s only documented reefs.

In September 2024, Churna Island and the sea surrounding it became Pakistan’s second designated marine protected area (MPA), an area of around 98 square kilometers (38 square miles). It followed the 2017 designation of the country’s very first MPA around Astola Island, a haven for coral, birds and sea turtles to the east. While Pakistan’s first two MPAs are small and have yet to be fully implemented, they represent baby steps in the country’s nascent effort to protect its marine environment.

“Given the growing anthropogenic and environmental threats to the biodiversity hotspots, it was inevitable to declare these areas marine protected areas,” Naeem Javid Muhammad Hassani, a wildlife conservator with the forest department of Balochistan province, which oversees both MPAs, told Mongabay. “Churna Island has vast coral biodiversity and Astola is home to both a variety of corals and avian species, especially the migratory birds, which needed to be protected.”

New protections, same old activities

Despite having biodiversity hotspots in both terrestrial and coastal areas, Pakistan had no mechanism for protecting these areas until 1992, when it joined 155 nations in signing the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, ratifying it two years later. As required by the convention, Pakistan enacted its first Biodiversity Action Plan in 1999. Later, the Aichi targets established in 2010 under the convention set Pakistan and the other signatories on a journey to protect 17% of their terrestrial and inland waters and 10% of their coastal and marine areas by 2020. The designation of the 401-km2 (155-mi2) Astola Island MPA was the first step, but it protected less than 0.2% of Pakistan’s total coastal and marine area of 240,000 km2 (92,660 mi2). Simply put, Pakistan missed the target.

The recent addition of the tiny Churna Island MPA barely moved the needle, and now there’s a new target under the convention: 30% of land and sea protected by 2030. Two other sites are currently being considered for designation as future MPAs: Kalmat Khor Lagoon in Balochistan, and Daboo and Patiani creeks in Sindh province, Soomro Naveed Ali, manager of the IUCN’s Sindh program, told Mongabay.

Pakistan’s coastline stretches more than 1,050 km (650 mi), harboring a variety of coastal ecosystems, including the world’s seventh-largest mangrove forest cover. Corals are scattered along the coast: a survey led by Amjad Ali, a marine biologist at the University of Karachi, and published in 2013 found no reef formations.

The country is home to 50 coral species, including 29 hard corals, with several species in the genus Porites dominating. Churna Island itself has 15 coral species, according to 2020 research by Ali and several colleagues, who also described finding a small patch reef formation at the island — the only reef formation documented in Pakistan. No studies have been conducted to assess the health of the reef since then. The island also has high fish diversity and abundance, according to a different study Ali led with some of the same collaborators.

Churna Island “is a significant biodiversity hotspot in Pakistan,” Ali told Mongabay. “The condition for coral formation near Churna is very conducive since the island functions as a shelter which saves coral species from strong waves and currents, which, otherwise, prevent coral formation.”

The new protections conferred on Churna Island aim, at least on paper, to prevent activities that could damage the corals, such as trawling and unregulated tourism. However, the new MPA still lacks a management plan, so these activities continue unregulated, putting a question mark over the effectiveness of declaring the island an MPA.

Threats to Pakistan’s coral

In 2020, a photo of a dead coral patch at Churna Island captured by a scuba diver went viral, stirring up much speculation as to the cause of death. At first, it was attributed to a massive oil spill in 2019 that reportedly came from the single point mooring located not far from Churna Island that tankers hitch up to and offload oil to a refinery on the mainland. Later, experts determined that human activities like unregulated fishing were behind the death of the coral.

Muhammad Moazzam Khan, a fisheries scientist with WWF-Pakistan, told Mongabay the original theory is closer to the truth. Critical infrastructure close to Churna Island, including the oil refinery, as well as an independent power-producing company and a coal power plant, all impact the corals, he said.

“All these industries release warm waste water into the sea which contributes to rising temperature and acidification of the sea,” Khan said. “This phenomenon is rather hazardous for the corals.”

It’s not just a local phenomenon. Globally, corals are under tremendous stress. Rising marine temperatures due to human-caused climate change are driving the ongoing fourth and most severe mass bleaching event on record, in which high temperatures cause corals to expel the symbiotic algae that live in their tissue, and turn white and weak. Prolonged bleaching can kill them. Rising marine temperatures in the Arabian Sea have been resulting in increasing cyclones, intensifying monsoon rains and increasing marine heat waves, disrupting food webs and energy fluxes.

Sitting in Ali’s office at the University of Karachi’s Centre of Excellence in Marine Biology is a large aquarium-like model of the ocean, apparently designed for teaching purposes. Ali, who discovered the patch reef at Churna Island, has been studying corals for more than two decades. “[C]orals undergo periods of stress owing to reasons such as rising temperature and higher nutrient concentration or rising acidification in the sea, but they have the potential to rebuild and adapt to the changing conditions,” Ali told Mongabay.

But he said he fears human activities that can stir up sediment are taking their toll on the corals around Churna, citing scuba diving and unregulated tourism in particular. Ali took out a dead coral and put it on the table, pointing to holes on its surface. “Corals have tiny pores through which they respire. Once dirt and other particles enter the water and rest on the corals, they choke their pores, leading to their death,” he said.

Protection, but no management plan

Shabir, 28, is a fisher from Mubarak, a village a few kilometers south of Manjhaar Beach and 45 km (28 mi) west of Karachi. He told Mongabay Churna Island has been a blessing for him and his fellow fishers, because it acts as a nursery where fish stocks remain high since the corals serve as shelters for smaller fish to dodge predators and thrive.

For the last eight years, Shabir, like the other fishers of Mubarak village, has been fishing with a pole and line, a relatively sustainable method since it catches fish one at a time. However, he said he’s quite frustrated with his declining catch, which he blamed on trawlers that operate near Churna, dragging small-mesh nets across the seabed.

“These trawlers devastate the fish communities,” Shabir said. “They catch even the smallest fish, leaving none behind to thrive for us. We spend the whole day on the sea, but come [home with] empty hands.”

Trawling is also known to stir up sediment that can smother coral.

With the declaration of Churna Island as an MPA, trawling is illegal in both the core and buffer zones around the island. But the provincial government’s delay in enacting an effective management plan has caused great concern. Without a management plan, it’s difficult to control trawling and other activities.

Many fishers don’t know what corals are, referring to them as komcha, or stones with sharp edges, in Balochi. They call corals a curse because they entangle the nets. To retrieve them, the fishers pull the nets hard and uproot coral colonies. Shabir said he has seen trawlers do this at Churna.

Khan from WWF, who has been closely following the issue, said a comprehensive management plan for the Churna Island MPA is ready, but multiple hurdles, including a lack of staff and insufficient funding, have delayed its finalization.

“The basic bottleneck to implementing the plan is the lack of manpower for which new jobs have to be created,” Khan said. “Currently the provincial government is trying to implement protections conferred under the notification informally, through different measures.”

It was just recently, in April, that the Balochistan provincial government officially endorsed the Astola Island MPA’s management plan, eight years after designating the MPA. The move specifies rules protecting the area, including prohibiting certain destructive fishing methods and requiring approval for diving and other recreational activities, and sets the stage for enforcement to begin.

Observers say they hope the path from MPA designation to implementation won’t take as long in the case of Churna Island.

Banner image: Churna Island as seen from the mainland. Image by Apm292 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

In Pakistan, sea level rise & displacement follow fisherfolk wherever they go

Citations:

Ali, A., Ormond, R., Leujak, W., & Siddiqui, P. J. A. (2013). Distribution, diversity and abundance of coral communities in the coastal waters of Pakistan. Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom, 94(1), 75-84. doi:10.1017/s0025315413001203

Ali, A., Siddiqui, P. J. A., Rasheed, M., Ahmad, N., Shafique, S., & Khokhar, F. N. (2020). Status of corals along the Sindh coast of Pakistan: Prevailing environmental conditions, their impacts on community structure and conservation approaches. Regional Studies in Marine Science, 39, 101391. doi:10.1016/j.rsma.2020.101391

Ali, A., Siddiqui, P. J. A., Ahmad, N., Amir, S. A., Masroor, R., Shafique, S., & Burhan, Z. (2021). Ecology of fish communities in coral habitats along the coast of Pakistan: Potential threats and conservation strategies. Pakistan Journal of Zoology, 53(4), 1341-1351. doi:10.17582/journal.pjz/20180602100601

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