Will we have a winner again this time?

Three years ago in Beijing, the Philippines reaped a bountiful harvest at the first Holcim Awards for Sustainable Construction, winning two of nine prizes in the global competition that recognizes contributions “to sustainable construction… in architecture, landscape, and urban design, civil and mechanical engineering and related disciplines.”

Lemuel Alfeche, a marine biologist from Cagayan de Oro, took the silver prize for the Asia Pacific region with a simple and ingenious structure that enables fast regeneration of corals in devastated areas.

The eight-legged concrete structure called Acanthasia is built on land then assembled Lego-like by divers underwater. Juvenile corals are planted onto this structure (the eight legs give it stability to withstand currents) and, in record time, they grow into a thriving coral community, attracting fish and other marine creatures that feed and breed among the corals.

“At present the acanthasia coral nursery has been harvested twice for cloning, producing more than 500 coral clones,” Alfeche told us in an email. “The second generation coral clones are also ready to donate third generation coral clones, and these also show accelerated growth rates.”

The project is located in beautiful Duka Bay in Medina, Misamis Oriental, and from the Duka Bay Resort, which serves as a base of operations for the acanthasia project, you can on a clear day see Camiguin island. The project has been so successful that Duka Bay has become a popular dive site, attracting dive enthusiasts with its varied and colorful corals and increased diversity of marine creatures. “There’s a dive boat from Cebu anchored here now with 12 European divers,” he shares enthusiastically in a phone conversation last Tuesday.

His group, the Medina Society of Environmental Advocates or Med-SEA, is now addressing the impact of increased tourist arrivals on the thriving though still fragile marine environment by providing mooring buoys for dive boats, so that the corals are not destroyed by anchors dropped indiscriminately. “We have to protect the corals now that they are growing well here,” he says.