NIPPERS
Generation Ocean Warriors It has always been a core mission at ANZA Nippers to teach children ocean preservation. KAT GILZMER shares how we do it, from guest speaker sessions to keeping the beach shipshape.
O
ver the years, each ANZA Nippers session has started with a beach clean-up: Age Managers and their respective age groups scour Palawan beach, picking up rubbish and disposing of it in the correct bins. It turns out to be a really fun gig as the children get excited over finding food wrappings, bottle lids, plastic and paper. The bad news is, plastic takes from 20 to 500 years to decompose (a plastic bag roughly 20 years; a bottle 450 years) and paper 4 - 6 weeks*. Sadly, despite our best efforts, a lot of the rubbish left on the sand by beachgoers ends up in the ocean.
Global hotspot
According to the United Nations, every minute, the equivalent of one rubbish truck of plastic is dumped into our oceans. Fish, seabirds, sea turtles and marine mammals can become entangled in or ingest plastic debris, causing suffocation, starvation, and drowning**. Throughout the season, ANZA Nippers event manager Jaq invites guest speakers to our sessions – back in October, we 76
hosted the Friends of Marine Park experts who shared their knowledge on corals and reef protection. We’re always grateful to these organisations who volunteer their time on a Sunday to educate the future Nippers have lots of questions for the experts generation. What many of us don’t realise is that Singapore sits in a global hotspot of coral reef diversity. Recent surveys show that the island contains more than 255 species of coral. That is half as much as the entire Great Barrier Reef, and nearly three times as many as live in the Atlantic Ocean! Singapore has about 600km2 of sea, with about 9.5km2 of coral reef, 6.26km2 of mangrove forest, and about 5km of mud flats. According to the Comprehensive Marine Biodiversity Survey by the National Parks Board (NParks) and the National University of
Singapore, the island is home to over 1100 species, including several new ones, only discovered as the survey was being carried out.
Eco challenges
The urgent need to address environmental challenges and to develop a conservation plan was recognised when Singapore announced a broadly conceptual National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) in 2009, followed by a holistic NParks’ Nature Conservation Master Plan (NCMP) in
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