sebadales tenerife restoration project

Hope for Tenerife’s seabed meadows

Compiled with the help of artificial intelligence, based on Spanish-language information. Source below the article.

A ray of hope is illuminating the seabed off Tenerife. One of the island’s most depleted ecosystems – the sebadales seagrass meadows – now has a chance to revive, thanks to a seed transplant project spearheaded by the marine conservation organisation Innoceana. In simple terms, this complex process involves extracting seeds from existing seagrass beds and planting them in areas where the meadows have thinned out. “It’s like helping a sick forest by adding more trees,” explains Carlos Mallo, founder of the NGO.

A champion for the oceans

Mallo, a civil engineer by training, is one of the people who succeeded in halting the controversial Fonsalía port development, a colossal project planned for one of the Canary Islands’ natural jewels: the Teno-Rasca Special Conservation Zone (ZEC). That campaign earned him the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2025, often described as the “Green Nobel” and regarded as the world’s most prestigious award for environmental activists.

His connection to Tenerife’s natural environment began in 2014, when he moved to the island to work on the island ring road, the route linking the north and south of Tenerife. “In that period I got to know all of the Canary Islands’ seabeds and began to understand the problem of the sebadales,” he says in an interview with this newspaper. In time, he left his career behind, founded Innoceana and relocated to the islands to work on preserving these meadows.

Underwater nurseries under threat

Despite their importance, the seagrass beds remain largely unknown to many island residents. “They’re called engineer species because they create the seabed. One of my main causes has been raising awareness of them, because there are people who live with their backs to the sea and to what it provides. That does a lot of damage, because you lose sensitivity, especially in a place like the Canary Islands which is profoundly blue,” he stresses.

Sebadales grow on sandy banks and are used by numerous species for protection, particularly juveniles. That’s why Mallo refers to them as the nursery of marine animals. “Without them, a fish in a sandy area is completely vulnerable to predators,” he explains. “These forests are full of life. They retain sediment, capture carbon dioxide and produce oxygen. They are meadows. So, just like terrestrial meadows, they provide little homes for marine life,” he adds.

They also serve as a food source for the green turtles that arrive in the Canary Islands and provide a host of ecosystem services that benefit people too. “First, without sebadales we would lose such a quantity of fish that we might not be able to eat fish in the Canary Islands at all. Second, they produce more oxygen than terrestrial forests. Then they act as carbon sinks and, moreover, they anchor the sand to the seabed. So if we lose the sebadales, we’re going to lose our beaches too,” the engineer explains.

A delicate plant facing multiple threats

Unlike its Mediterranean counterpart, which has had longer to evolve and is therefore hardier, able to grow in harbours and heavily polluted areas, the Canarian seagrass is extremely delicate. Its fragile nature is compounded by numerous threats. Among the most significant dangers are discharges from land into the sea, whether sewage, brine or leachate. “Wastewater is very harmful to sebadales. People flush absolutely everything down the toilet: oils, chemicals, wet wipes that block the pipes… And sadly, in most cases in the Canary Islands, we don’t have a functioning treatment system,” he laments. “I’ve seen how in Alcalá (Guía de Isora), where there used to be a large patch of sebadal, the seagrass around the outfall pipe has disappeared,” Mallo gives as an example.

The art of underwater gardening

Underwater gardening is no easy task, and even less so when transplanting a plant as sensitive as seagrass. Mallo explains that the process has gone through several phases. The first was removing vast quantities of rubbish from seagrass areas so they could regenerate. “We’ve hauled out sun loungers, tyre rims and lost anchors,” recounts the Innoceana founder. “Fortunately, the sea is resilient, and if you remove that pressure it starts to recover,” he adds.

After the clean-up, the NGO ran pilot trials transplanting seagrass cuttings from one part of Tenerife to another. “That’s where we encountered a lot of problems. It’s like planting an oasis in the desert, and it’s almost impossible to create a sebadal where no sebadal remains, because a pufferfish might turn up and eat it all,” he details.

The latest phase, in which the team is currently immersed, involves collecting seagrass seeds and taking them to a laboratory. “This is extremely complex. You have to survey many meadows, work out which one has enough seeds for removal not to harm it, and then go and collect them,” he says.

Guided by the Ministry for Ecological Transition and the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC), Innoceana’s members collect up to 1,500 seeds at El Médano (Granadilla), with the Ministry’s permission. The seeds are then taken to a laboratory, where they are placed in jars of seawater with a special solution to help them grow quickly and strong. “After three months, we take the little pots and carry them to Abades, where the meadow has lost some density but still exists,” he concludes.

Restoration is not enough

All these efforts, Mallo insists, could be in vain if the problems destroying the sebadales are not brought to an end. “For me and my team, restoration is about visualising a problem and trying to do something to show there is a solution, but we also have to stop many other things, like the discharges, ensuring boats can use mooring buoys instead of dropping anchor, and people continuing to throw so much rubbish into the sea,” he proposes. To that end, Innoceana has also brought the Cabildo of Tenerife on board with the project.

Global reach

When Carlos Mallo speaks to this newspaper by phone, he is about to set sail for Costa Rica, home to one of the four other outposts Innoceana has deployed around the world. The organisation also has bases in the United States and Fiji. The engineer ended up in Costa Rica by chance, and now runs a marine conservation centre there with an ambitious education programme, completely free of charge, to teach young people about the sea. They also have a laboratory there, though this time it’s for corals.

This year is proving especially difficult, as sea temperatures have hit historic highs and it is also an El Niño year – a meteorological phenomenon that causes surface waters in the Pacific to become warmer than usual. “We’re recording temperatures of nearly 32.5 degrees off Isla del Caño, and as a result the corals are dying en masse,” he reports. That’s why they have launched an awareness campaign to familiarise people with the issue. “If people don’t know what’s happening, we can’t do anything,” he concludes.

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