Penghu's seafloor is home to a signature dreamscape: vast purple coral reefs that spread like a lavender garden beneath the waves. To protect this beautiful marine environment, the Shin Kong Life Charitable Foundation invested in a "Biochar Coral Restoration Brick Project" in 2025, adding a new layer of support to the reef's existing ecological foundation. According to native coral survey data released by the project team in September 2025, hard coral coverage in the area has reached 45.6%, dead coral coverage has been reduced to zero, and 46 species of stony coral across 8 families and 17 genera have been fully identified for the first time — a testament to the reef's remarkable ecological resilience. Starting in 2026, this thriving marine habitat will be transformed into a living venue for sustainable resilience tourism, inviting visitors to dive in and personally participate in data collection as citizen marine scientists.
From Bleaching Memories to a Miracle of Zero Mortality: Resilient Renewal on the Hang Bay Seabed
The project team entered the water on 4 September 2025. At a depth of 5 m, a water temperature of 29°C, and visibility of 12 m, they worked their way along five transect lines, recording data point by point. The final results were exhilarating: hard coral coverage came in at 45.6%, rock substrate at 31.7%, and dead coral coverage at 0%.
Just how rare is that 0%? In 2024, corals worldwide endured a severe bleaching event, and Penghu's reefs were not spared. The fact that Hang Bay's corals could achieve 0% dead coral coverage within just one year means the symbiotic algae have returned, the reef structure has stabilized, and the corals are growing back on their own.
Yet, given the unpredictability of extreme climate events, the Shin Kong Life Charitable Foundation deployed biochar coral restoration bricks in 2025 to reinforce this hard-won reef health and provide long-lasting support for local coral restoration efforts. So what exactly are these "biochar coral restoration bricks" that carry such high hopes?
What Are Biochar Coral Restoration Bricks? Locking Carbon into the Sea — and Giving Coral a Home
Many people assume coral restoration is simply a matter of gluing broken branches back onto the reef — the Editor thought the same at first. But the "biochar coral restoration bricks" deployed by the Shin Kong Life Charitable Foundation take a very different, technology-driven ecological approach.
"Biochar" is a carbon-rich solid produced by burning organic biomass at high temperatures in an oxygen-limited environment. Exceptionally stable, it can remain on the seafloor for hundreds of years without decomposing, effectively locking carbon into its structure for the long term. When shaped into restoration bricks and placed on the seabed, the bricks serve a dual purpose: they act as a blue carbon sequestration medium, and their rough surfaces provide the perfect sheltered substrate for coral polyps to attach to. This is precisely the kind of "nature-based solution" that the international community has been championing in recent years.
Even more significantly, the biochar used here was not just any char. It holds European Biochar Certificate (EBC) verification and is made from a material recognized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as having carbon dioxide removal capabilities. The resulting coral restoration bricks represent the world's first coral restoration project to receive internationally recognized carbon sink certification. Using applicable carbon sink methodologies, this initiative has generated a net carbon removal benefit of 0.313 metric tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (t CO₂e), which has been registered in the Global C-Sink Registry. In other words, as the coral slowly grows back, the seafloor is simultaneously making a solid contribution to the planet's carbon ledger.
In 2025, the Shin Kong Life Charitable Foundation deployed 100 biochar bricks and transplanted 552 coral specimens at Hang Bay in Penghu, designating the site as a long-term monitoring plot. This is not a fireworks show — plant the coral, take some photos, and pack up and leave. The Shin Kong Life Charitable Foundation has continued to invest resources in an ongoing collaboration with BlueTrend to track how the young corals are developing and whether fish and other marine life are returning to call the reef home.
What the Editor Did in the Field: From Communications to Coral Monitoring
BlueTrend's role in this project went beyond translating complex scientific language to help more people understand Penghu's restoration journey. The team also worked closely with local dive operator Ocean Channel (海洋途徑) to advance future coral monitoring efforts together.
The intricacy of underwater monitoring exceeded all expectations. The Editor's colleagues had to hug the reef, using measuring tapes to document the growth morphology of corals one by one. That dreamscape that divers have nicknamed the "lavender garden" is composed of the 490 stony coral colonies — 46 species across 8 families and 17 genera — recorded in this survey. The fastest-growing genus, Acropora, alone accounted for 23 species and 438 colonies, their densely branching forms weaving together and spreading across the seafloor in sweeping sheets. Beyond coral, indicator fish species including parrotfish, grouper, and butterflyfish were all sighted, with a total of 36 species across 12 families recorded.
In fact, the Penghu County Government Marine Animal Hatchery has been quietly deploying restoration bricks in and around Hang Bay since as early as 2006, steadily cultivating the reef through asexual propagation. In 2024, they even captured, for the first time, the spectacular sight of artificially transplanted corals spawning en masse. Standing before this coral garden shaped by years of cumulative effort, the Editor felt a deep sense of hope: the biochar coral seedlings planted in 2025 will surely grow into just as stunning a landscape in the years to come.
Sustainable Resilience Tourism from 2026: One Tank, One Day as a Citizen Marine Scientist
Exciting news is on the horizon: starting in 2026, with the support of the Shin Kong Life Charitable Foundation, BlueTrend and local dive operator Ocean Channel will join forces to transform the Hang Bay biochar restoration site into a living venue for sustainable resilience tourism.
Visitors coming to dive in Penghu don't need to be professional scientists. Anyone with diving and photography skills can genuinely participate in the coral biodiversity project on every single dive. Under the guidance of a dive guide, participants can help document coral growth conditions and later revisit those records through BlueXplore — BlueTrend's soon-to-launch citizen science platform — to track how the coral is developing over time. Your underwater observations will become real data that feeds into scientific research.
The Editor believes that turning conservation into a hands-on travel experience carries far more meaning than simply diving in to take photos. For the coral, every extra pair of eyes recording what's below adds one more layer of protection for the ocean.
Good News Deserves Telling — and So Do the Warning Signs
That said, the Editor doesn't want to report only the highlights. The same monitoring report also documented the pressures Hang Bay is bearing: 21 pieces of general marine debris, 1 instance of anchor damage, and 2 entangled ghost nets recorded underwater. On top of that, large fish species such as Napoleon Wrasse and humphead parrotfish were nowhere to be seen, and even the parrotfish observed were mostly juveniles — a clear sign that poaching pressure on the site remains heavy.
So while the localized data from this survey paints an encouraging picture, the overall resilience of Hang Bay's coral ecosystem is still in recovery — particularly in light of global climate change and the shadow cast by the mass bleaching event of 2024. These impressive numbers are no reason for complacency. This is precisely why the project must incorporate biodiversity credits and pursue long-term monitoring: only by translating restoration outcomes into verifiable, visualizable scientific data will corporate ESG funding feel confident enough to commit for the long haul — and only then will coral restoration receive the sustained resources it needs to endure.
Closing Thoughts: Let Every Chance Encounter Become the Starting Point of Protection
The biochar coral restoration bricks are doing more than locking carbon on the seafloor — they are turning Penghu's Hang Bay into a sustainable resilience tourism destination that anyone can participate in with ease.
For the Shin Kong Life Charitable Foundation, this pilot study is only the beginning. The Foundation plans to continue investing in coral monitoring at Hang Bay over a five-year period and to gradually expand the demonstration model to other marine areas around Penghu, weaving a regional restoration network. Beyond that, the Shin Kong Life Charitable Foundation is also channeling resources into marine environmental education, helping more people understand the value of coral reefs and the ocean. Through the sustained commitment of corporate sustainability resources, coral restoration can evolve from a one-off event into a genuinely continuous conservation endeavor.
If you're planning a diving trip to Penghu in 2026, consider adding "spend a day as a citizen marine scientist" to your itinerary — and let the journey carry the added layer of protecting the sea.
Related Links
- Organizer: Shin Kong Life Charitable Foundation
- Biochar provider: Guangtai EnviroEnergy
- Local partner dive shop: Ocean Channel
（This article is adapted from a press release by the Shin Kong Life Charitable Foundation. The original report was published by China Times: 海底「植樹」 全球首例生物炭珊瑚復育磚 落腳澎湖。）
