How To Measure Your Corporate Social Responsibility Programs

Most of the CSR projects in the UAE are land based, which makes for easy logistics for employees to join the activities, and in some cases, this is an opportunity for companies to combine their internal team-building goals with their drive to do something good for the community or environment. However, the more environmentally “switched on” companies are looking at how they can help to protect the ocean, with an eye on opportunities within the emerging “blue economy”.

The ocean underpins the health of the planet; it produces more than half of the world’s oxygen, regulates the planet’s temperature and has sequestered 31% of the CO2 emissions between the beginning of the industrial revolution and the mid-1990s.(1) It also captures 90 percent of the excess heat generated by these emissions, and is the largest source of wild or domestic protein on the planet, providing around 15% of the global animal protein we eat, although in the least developed countries, this proportion rises to 50%+. (2)

The ocean also provides jobs to almost half the global population, marine fisheries alone employ around 57 million people.(2)

To summarise, if the ocean fails, the viability of the planet fails for the human population, so this is THE biggest ecological issue that needs to be managed to ensure our future survival.

OK, enough dramatic talk, what can we realistically do about it? The oceans are huge, and it seems like an insurmountable challenge for the average person to make a positive impact, however there are actions that can and must be taken right now to help maintain the health of the world’s oceans.

High on the list is the preservation of our coral reefs. Scientists have evaluated the biodiversity that is created on or by coral reefs, and their estimates range from 25 to 35 percent of the total number of species in the ocean. Just to put that in perspective, we are talking about a similar number of species to those produced by the Amazonian rain forest, except that coral reefs are present on less than 0.1% of the ocean floor! That’s important, because the reefs produce food for marine creatures and for humans, as well as helping to balance the delicate ocean ecosystems.

Rising sea temperatures, ocean acidification and pollution, as well as coastal development, have all placed a huge amount of pressure on coral reefs, and there are predictions that without immediate corrective action we could lose 70 to 90 percent of all coral reefs by the year 2050. There have been increasingly frequent coral bleaching events over the last decades due to high surface sea temperatures, and on the west coast of the UAE, some species of coral are already almost extinct.

Globally, it is estimated that the loss of tourism due to coral bleaching alone is as much as $12 billion annually. With ocean levels rising as the temperature of our planet increases, coastline-specific tourism and energy industries are at risk along with the 680 million people who live in low-lying coastal areas, a number that is expected to rise to one billion by 2050.(2)

After major coral bleaching events in the UAE in 2021 and 2023, with another bleaching event expected in 2024 as a result of the El Niño weather system that started in 2023, we need to act now to protect what we have left. The corals in the Gulf states are the most heat resistant species on the planet, and as such they provide a critically important role in helping scientists determine how to protect corals from rising sea temperatures in the rest of the world.