Indonesia: Students Innovate to Save Coral Reefs around Bungkutoko Island

High school students from Kendari in Southeast Sulawesi and Jakarta have been recognized for their innovative efforts to promote the importance of conserving coral reefs.

Niar, a student at State Senior High School No. 1 in Kendari, the provincial capital, won the sixth annual Young Innovators Contest (KIM), organized by the Indonesian Institute for Sciences (LIPI).

At the awards ceremony in Jakarta on Saturday, Niar described his project as an interactive game for primary school students to help them understand threats to the coral reefs around the province’s Bungkutoko Island. “The kids in the fourth to sixth grades there know how to make bombs to destroy the coral so that they can break off pieces to play with,” he said.

To address this, he went on, the game teaches them about the environmental consequences of their practice and of dynamite fishing. The two other finalists in the contest were Jovita, from Tarsius 1 Catholic High School in Jakarta, and Noel, from SMAN 1, also on the capital.

Zainal Arifin, the head of LIPI’s Oceanography Research Center, said the competition was aimed at nurturing a future generation of Indonesians that was both keenly aware of environmental issues and bold enough to seek creative solutions to address them.

He added that the contest started out with 92 proposals from students across the country, and was part of LIPI’s Coral Reef Rehabilitation and Management Program (COREMAP).

Lukman Hakim, the LIPI chairman, said there was still a high level of ignorance among people about the damage they were doing to marine ecosystems, in particular coral reefs, through destructive fishing practices, dumping and pollution.

“This exercise serves as a pool for high school students to gather all their innovative and creative ideas about ways to save the coral reefs, then get the ideas out there,” he said.

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Subsea World News Staff , November 28, 2011;