Conservationist and founder of Livingseas Asia

I'm proud that I'm able to not only create an impact on an ecosystem but also being able to make people care about the ocean a little bit more.
Tell us your story – how did you get here?
My story started in Singapore when I started diving. There’s not much diving to do in Singapore, so a lot of my diving was outbound, and I travelled all over South East Asia, and even as far as Mexico and the USA and Japan to dive. Over the years, I noticed that things weren’t getting better for the ocean. Every year I would go back to dive in the same locations, and I would remember it looking better and richer in the previous years. This was a common occurrence, and it got me thinking and wanting to do something about it.
However, seeing a coral bleaching event first-hand in Phuket back in 2010 made me really get up and do something about it. I saw an entire reef full of corals and fish, hundreds of metres long, totally die in the span of a few months. All of the marine life was gone from the reef, and seeing this up close and personal had a very emotional and visceral reaction on me. I started researching and joining projects to learn about coral restoration with the aim of starting my own project one day.
Fast forward a few years, and I’ve set up an operation in Bali, and it was finally time to start building out a reef! We started in 2015 with some experiments, and by 2018 I found a methodology that worked very well in my area. We started building more, but it was only during the pandemic when tourism disappeared that we suddenly had the time to focus on building the reef. It was at that point that we really started scaling up our restoration efforts, and to date, we’ve covered 2,300 sqm of degraded reef with a new healthy coral reef full of marine life!
What accomplishment are you most proud of?
I’m most proud of showing that restoring the reef ecosystem is not only possible, but it can be sustainable as well. Now that tourism is back and people are travelling again, a lot of people have started to visit our site to learn and to appreciate the marine life there.
I believe that it’s not good enough to rebuild an ecosystem, we also have to influence the people and stakeholders that impact that ecosystem. So for us, training and bringing into our team more than 30 local youth is very important. Even as important as inspiring all of the people who come to join our workshops and coral planting activities.
I’m proud that I’m able to not only create an impact on an ecosystem but also being able to make people care about the ocean a little bit more.
What impact have you made in Bali?
Apart from the ecosystem restoration that we are continuing to create and build upon, we are also making an impact on the younger generation.
Over the past two years, we have had more than 60 middle and high school students from the Green School coming to join us for coral restoration during a 7-week “Jalan Jalan” programme organized by the school. Teaching them and getting them to appreciate marine restoration efforts and why it is so necessary makes me hopeful that the next generation can do better than previous generations in protecting what’s left of our fragile ecosystems.
Apart from them, we are also training local youth how to dive and how to do coral restoration, and I trust that they will be able to carry this forward and keep the reef healthy even after I’m gone.
What does the future look like for you?
In a few weeks, we will be launching a new sustainable tourism activity with a coral restoration pontoon anchored above our restoration site. This means that participants don’t have to be divers to come and learn and contribute to coral planting, anybody can come onboard, plant some corals on our reef structures, and enjoy all the life below by snorkelling above!
This pontoon has been sponsored by the TUI Care Foundation, and through this partnership, we hope to be able to inspire even more people about the ocean and really start to scale up the size of the restored reef.
This activity would be perfect for travellers and families who come to Bali and are looking for a sustainable way to contribute back to the environment while learning something new about the ocean.
I’m super excited to be able to introduce coral restoration to an even bigger audience, and get everybody to care a little bit more about the ocean and the reefs!
What do you love most about Bali?
I love the fact that Bali is at the same time modern and yet there’s so much untouched nature. Despite all of the tourism development in the South, you only need to drive one or two hours away to get back to pristine forests, mountain trails, white beaches, and amazing reefs.
The Tri Hita Karana culture of the Balinese, allowing them to respect nature while still developing new and exciting things is amazing to me.
What does being sustainable mean to you?
Sustainability to me means both having a short-term and a long-term view towards making your time here on the Earth as useful and positive as possible.
In the short term, it means making small unconscious choices such as what you choose to consume (not just food and drink, but products, transport, and electricity as well, everything really!) and how you choose to do that each day. These small actions once developed into a habit can make a person more or less sustainable, it only takes the awareness to do so.
In the long term, it’s about the larger choices such as where you live, what you do, and how you are creating a more positive impact and taking action to regrow, restore, and regenerate life on the planet. The alternative would be contributing towards more negative impact on the planet.
I don’t believe it’s possible to reduce our negative impacts to absolute zero, so we should instead focus on increasing our positive impact on the world, in whatever way that makes each person happy to do.
Who is your Local Legend and why?
I would nominate Mathias Boissonot, the CEO of Handprint, who is revolutionizing how we look at sustainable impact.