Profile: Climate leader with answers

Kenyan marine scientist David Obura has become the first African to chair the Intergovernmental Science Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)

As a boy, David Obura made a pact with his mother whenever they went on holiday to their cottage at Tiwi, on the Kenya coast. If low tide happened to be in the middle of the day, he didn’t have to come in for lunch. Foraging in rock pools, looking for corals, hermit crabs and tiny vivid tropical fish were what he enjoyed most. He said, “What was the point of coming in to eat?”

Now 53, Obura always knew he wanted to be a biologist. His mother, a fervent educationist, encouraged him. Partly Irish and Welsh, she moved to Kenya when, just before independence in 1963, she married Obura’s father, the first Kenyan dentist, whom she had met in London.

While her husband, who’d grown up in the Migori sugar area of Western Kenya, built a private practice, Mrs Obura became fascinated with the Kenyan outdoors and took her three children on safari whenever she could. St Andrews Turi, with its scouts and camping, was followed by the United World College on Vancouver Island off the west coast of Canada, where the teenagers on the diving course looked after a local ecological reserve.

Harvard helped hone Obura’s skills as well as his passion. Joining the rowing team taught him discipline and the power of working together, he says. “That was really important.” And its marine science programme, which gave him three months in Oregon and another three in Jamaica, offered him a professional goal. “I knew I wanted to study coral reefs. And I knew I wanted to do the project work in Kenya after I’d finished, rather than studying abroad and not being able to apply what I’d learned back at home.” Signing up for a PhD at the University of Miami, under Peter Glen, who had studied coral reefs in the Galapagos Islands, provided the opening he needed.

Obura brought what he learned back to Kenya, and built on it. His early research on how sedimentation from the Sabaki river, that flows through Tsavo East National Park, might be killing the reefs at Watamu and Malindi took a new turn when he realised that although the corals were becoming bleached, sedimentation was not the cause.

Ever the scientist, Obura was not afraid to change his mind when the facts changed. “My PhD became a study of corals coping with stress.” His supervisor provided crucial insight. In the late 1990s, climate change was considered way down the list of stresses affecting coral reefs. But during the drought of 1997/98, El Nino increased the temperature of the sea in East Africa. Peter Glen recalled seeing similar effects after El Nino swept through the eastern Pacific in 1982/83. “That was clearly to do with climate change,” Obura says.

Monitoring Kenya’s coral reefs on Lamu island brought him in contact with local fishing communities and the Kenya Wildlife Service. But it was when KWS designated the Diani marine reserve, further south, that Obura began working at the frontline of the conflict between stakeholders such as fisherman, residents and tourists. “This was the hotpoint around human interactions around coral reefs in Kenya. I reckoned if we could get things to work there, then we can spin it out to other places.”

Obura made a point of talking to the fishermen, mapping out where they fished and the names they used for the reef. At the same time as he continued his scientific research, Obura drew on the teamwork he’d learned on the Harvard rowing team. “I realised even more than the scientific information coming out, it was the interaction that was critical, because you had to gain the confidence of the fishing community.”

As Obura’s horizons expanded, he began consolidating the different strands of his work, creating East Africa’s most important marine research hub, CORDIO (Coastal Oceans Research and Development in the Indian Ocean). It covers Kenya, Tanzania and Mozambique as well as the island territories of Madagascar, Comoros, Seychelles and Mauritius.

An enthusiastic public speaker and gifted narrator of documentaries about the sea, Obura is acutely conscious that coral reefs are an indicator for what happens in other ecosystems – and, even more urgent, that most of what affects the sea starts onshore. “All the problems in the ocean really come from the land. If you don’t solve problems there, they will spill into the ocean.”

Obura has no time to be a grand old man of the sea. But he is clear about where he sees his future. “I don’t want to be one of those scientists just documenting the decline of coral reefs.” How to become a potent voice on a global policy level is what engages him most now. “We need to incorporate the true cost of business, in terms of climate and biodiversity, into the prices of goods and services, and into the financial markets, so that money is being put into the right places.”