BY JACQUI L’ANGE
Nour Farid’s earliest childhood memories are of a generous and abundant Red Sea, and he dedicated his life to protecting its delicate marine ecosystem. As Managing Director of the Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association (HEPCA), Nour shares the story of the NGO’s origins and its innovative measures to safeguard Egypt’s Great Fringing Reef.
When Nour was a young boy, his mother would take him to the Hurghada seashore each morning to see mermaids. “The dugongs used to come up onto the beach,” he remembers. “My mom would say, ‘Nour, look at the mermaids!’ ”
These marine mammals – their name comes from the Malay word ‘duyong’, which means ‘lady of the sea’ – were just one of many wonders at the northern tip of Egypt’s Red Sea coastline. Nour also remembers fish so plentiful that his father could catch them with his bare hands. “Trevallies or jacks would hunt smaller fish, which would be swimming so fast to get away they would end up on the sand. My father would just walk over and pick up a fresh one for our dinner.”
Nour’s family moved to Cairo when he started pre-school, but they still spent every summer in Hurghada, where Nour and his brother spent balmy summer months exploring the Red Sea coastline. “My mom used to leave us to roam free. We would ‘borrow’ a small boat and go to the closest island, rowing the dinghy with our hands, watching the crabs and the other creatures along the shore.”
With his roots in that idyllic Hurghada, is it any wonder Nour grew into a staunch defender of the Red Sea and its inhabitants?
Nour started diving in the early 90s. He was among the first to explore the reefs around Hurghada and the Marsa Alam islands, where the fish were curious to see people in their world. He experienced the ‘golden age’ of Egyptian diving, when tourists from Europe discovered the year-round mild weather, crystalline waters and astonishing coral reefs. “The sea was still full. It was virgin. It was amazingly beautiful. Lots of fish, lots of untouched coral.”
As the numbers of visitors increased, so did the number of dive centres, hotels, and airports. In 1996, Nour’s dive centre, together with 11 others, founded HEPCA (Hurghada Environmental Protection and Conservation Association) to protect the precious ecosystem.
Innovative projects
The dive community relied on coral for their business, but realised that their boats were creating a problem. “We noticed that anchoring was damaging the corals. We had to find a different way of stopping at dive sites.” HEPCA now has the biggest buoy-based mooring system in the world.
Dive instructors were also tasked with spreading awareness. “Every dive master who took tourists on a boat had to mention HEPCA, and teach tourists: don’t use your hands, use your eyes.” At the early stages of building the mooring system, they donated two days every month to work for HEPCA, doing clean-ups, mooring installations, and environmental conservation. “As divers, conserving nature is conserving our livelihood. It as simple as that. No corals, no fish, no diving, no job.”
HEPCA also needed funding to keep up its conservation work. Which is where the second innovation came in: turning the problem of solid waste into a source of revenue.
Circular Solutions
“With so much development, there was a lot of waste, some of it going into the sea,” Nour says. HEPCA expanded its clean ups, taking over solid waste management on land in order to protect the sea. In a perfect example of a circular economy in action, their government contract, plus a business selling recyclables, now funds the organization’s conservation work. “We are self-financed now, we don’t rely on donors.”
Yet another circular HEPCA innovation uses hotel food waste. “We wanted to make sure this is not going into landfills, where it becomes methane gas and contributes to global warming.” Instead, they upcycle uncontaminated food waste by spreading it on concrete platforms to dry, then bag it to provide Bedouins with supplementary feed for their animals, who are also feeling the effects of global warming. Less rain means less grazing for traditional nomadic herders. “Now, they have more animal feed, so they have more goats, which means more wool and more leather to make handicrafts to sell. So where there used to be conflict with tourism, especially in the more tribal south, we now have cooperation.”
Diversity meets scarcity
Another benefit of healthier herds on land is less demand for fish. The Red Sea hosts an incredible diversity of fish, but it is not a traditional fishing ground.
“All around the Red Sea is desert. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan – none of these countries that share the Red Sea have a single river bringing in organic matter to the sea, which would provide a source of food for fish.” The lack of inflow into the sea is another reason the visibility is so good – with exception of coral spawning season, which happens during the full moon each April.
Nour describes the Red Sea as a desert with a big oasis in the middle: the reef system. Red Sea fish rely on three things for sustenance: seagrass, mangroves, and coral. “So this is a very delicately balanced system, and very fragile.” The Red Sea’s fragility is also its strength; it evolved to survive on so little. But it cannot stand up to the pressures of industrial fishing.
When the Mediterranean felt the effects of overfishing and pollution, its fishing industry looked to the Red Sea as a resource. “These fishermen used nets and other fishing methods not traditional for the Red Sea. There has never been a big fishing industry or fishing community here.”
In the 70s, Hurghada’s population was in the thousands. Today, Hurghada has over 200,000 inhabitants. But even amidst the boom in development, there were quiet periods. Nour and his colleagues experienced three distinct drops in tourism, and its impact on the sea, after 911, the Egyptian revolution, and COVID.
“It was actually healthy for the sea. We could see direct impacts from the dip in tourism on what was happening in the ocean.” Unfortunately, the ‘break for the sea’ which was COVID also brought a different pressure; many divers who could no longer earn a living from the diving business turned to spear-gun fishing.
The practice is outlawed in Egypt, but the temptation was there for divers with tanks and a sea empty of spectators. “The grouper is an expensive fish, easy to hunt. So in one evening you could easily come away with 100 kg of fish. Today you will hardly find groupers in Hurghada.”
Plan to Preserve
Nour believes the biggest conservation lesson learned from the tourism boom is that development started before conservation, rather than the other way around.
Much of the western shoreline of the Red Sea is traced by the fringe reef. “A fringe reef is one that grows on the coastline, which means you have mostly reef, rather than beach,” Nour explains. “So they were building hotels on reef, to get space along the shore line. They were landfilling, putting sand in the sea, to create a beach.”
Thanks to lobbying by HEPCA, the Egyptian government outlawed this practice in 1996. “I can proudly say there is only HEPCA working in the Red Sea area, on matters of conservation and protection of natural resources, whether terrestrial or marine.” HEPCA’s greatest campaign has been calling for protection for the Great Fringing Reef in 2022 – just after Lewis Pugh swam across the Red Sea ahead of COP 27, in partnership with the organisation.
Two things make conservation of the Great Fringing Reef imperative. First is the speed and level and damage being done to it through overuse and overfishing. The second is its ‘super coral’, which is like no other in the world.
Red Sea corals faces the same pressures from the effects of Global Warming as other corals around the world. But they respond differently.
“Everybody’s talking about ‘two degrees’ and how we will lose 99% of the world’s coral of we cross that threshold,” Nour says. But the corals of the Red Sea, and in particular of the fringe reef, are different.
“They have very high resilience, a very high tolerance to temperature and even to damage.” And because these corals are used to relatively little food and harsh conditions, Nour says, “they rebuild themselves more quickly than other corals that have abundance of food around them.”
In tropical areas, where most of the world’s coral is found, there is no real difference between summer and winter, so water temperature variation stays between 2°C to 3°C. “In Hurghada we are subtropical – in winter it can be 15°C, in the summer between 35°C and 40°C. Same in the water. We can have 18°C to 21°C water temperature in winter, and in summer up to 35°C degrees at the surface where the corals actually exist. These corals are used to big fluctuations in temperature. They don’t bleach as quickly.” And in a few bleaching events in the south, corals showed a high recovery rate of 80%, according to HEPCA’s last scientific report.
If global temperatures continue increasing at the current rate, Red Sea coral could be the last surviving coral in the world. This is the message HEPCA took to COP 27. “We told world leaders at Sharm el Sheikh: this coral just under your feet is going to be the last surviving coral if you don’t do anything. Let’s get more protection for it.”
The Great Fringe Future
Egypt’s Great Fringing Reef runs for more than 2000 km along the shoreline of the Gulfs of Aqaba and Suez, along the mainland of the Red Sea Governorate, and around some 44 islands.
A complex confluence of currents on the Saudi side bring warm water up from the Indian Ocean. At a certain point the current turns, and an upwelling of cooler waters creates stable temperatures on the Egyptian side that keep the reef alive. “That’s the reason we’re focusing on 2000 kilometres of reef on the Egyptian side. Half of that is now protected.” By declaring the Great Fringing Reef a ‘hope spot’ for these last super corals, HEPCA aims to protect the other 50%.
“As our scientific adviser Dr Mahmoud Hanafy always says, ‘Declare first, study later,’ because if you spend too much time studying how to declare, by the time you declare it a protected area, it’s gone.”
HEPCA continues to call for strict rules around investment in and development inside protected areas, “to make sure that any development there is sustainable, green, and environmentally-friendly.”
Partners like the Great Fringing Reef Alliance make a real difference on the ground. “There are lots of people, lots of great minds, who want to help. We direct them to the Alliance as the best way to actually protect the Red Sea, especially in the south, because that’s what’s left.”
Such proactive protections could ensure that the gentle ‘mermaids’ of Nour’s childhood, and the thousands of other enchanting marine creatures living amongst the super coral, will be there for future generations to marvel over.
Read more about HEPCA and the work they do here.
