Protecting the blue heart of Singapore: Dr Karenne Tun

Dr Karenne Tun fell in love with coral reefs when she started diving in 1990 and knew she wanted to focus on this as a profession. She was mesmerised by the sheer colour and grandeur of the reefscape in her first dive and she has not looked back since.

As Group Director, National Biodiversity Centre at the National Parks Board, she has a job she loves! Together with her team, she looks after Singapore’s biodiversity across the terrestrial and marine domains to realise our City in Nature vision. Specifically for the marine environment, this ranges from investigating unexplained wild fish deaths, to assessing the responses of marine life to elevated sea surface temperature. She is also often at interagency meetings, where she works with agency stakeholders to resolve the wide-ranging issues they face and to provide technical advice in support of national policymaking.

Her work is no mean feat; it calls for long, atypical office hours. But Karenne has no complaints. “As long as I wake up each day thinking, ‘What can I do today that will protect or improve Singapore’s natural environment?’, I know that I am in the right job.”

Her team also manages Singapore’s first marine park – the Sisters’ Islands Marine Park – where they promote responsible stewardship of marine resources through outreach and education programmes. The Sisters’ Islands Marine Park is not just a place to bring people closer to Singapore’s underwater life. It is also a living laboratory for marine scientists in Singapore to study corals, fish and other marine creatures that adorn our coastal areas – and where people can get up close with the research.

“After working on coral reef biology, ecology, conservation and management for many years, applying my knowledge and experience to establish a marine park that can be a model for other marine parks around the world was indeed a unique opportunity,” she says.

More recently, Karenne played a key role in launching NParks’ 100K Corals Initiative, which seeks to transplant 100,000 corals into Singapore’s waters over a decade and beyond – the most ambitious coral restoration effort in Singapore.

This initiative draws directly on Karenne’s experience as a PhD student at NUS Science, where her research focused on the impacts of anthropogenic activities on coral reefs as well as in developing tools for coral reef monitoring and management. Prior to her PhD, Karenne worked at WorldFish, Malaysia, coordinating regional coral reef monitoring reporting for the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network. Today, she continues to draw on her expertise to actively support regional and global coral reef monitoring and conservation efforts.

She says, “Healthy reefs protect marine biodiversity and contribute to climate resilience. Through science-based restoration and collaborative partnerships, our work contributes to maintaining healthy marine ecosystems, and in building ecological and community resilience.”