Brigitta Maria Andrea Gunawan’s love for the ocean is changing the world
This is an excerpt from MEGA March 2025 New Voices features story
Whether it is by fate or by choice, Brigitta Maria Andrea Gunawan’s affinity with salt water began when she took her first steps as a toddler on a beach in Bali. From there she embarked on a mission to save the coral reefs in her home country by working with the communities, encouraging movers and leaders from all over the world to do the same. All the while excelling in her studies.
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Born and raised in Jakarta, Indonesia, 21-year-old Brigitta is an ocean advocate and a bachelor of science student in Monash University in Australia. She is the founder of 30×30 Indonesia, a movement to engage the community to advance marine protected areas in her country. She has shared her work and passion for the ocean on many stages including the United Nations Ocean Conference, the Asia Parks Congress, and the UNLEASH Global Innovation Lab.
MEGA sits down in a call with Brigitta to talk about her work and the message she has been sharing for her cause.
HOW DID YOUR INTEREST IN OCEAN PROTECTION START ?
I’ve always known that I love the environment, with the ocean especially. I was very comfortable whenever my parents brought us to the beach. I even took my first steps on the shores of Bali. But it was not until high school where everyone was thinking about what they want to do in the university, what do you want to do as a career? I decided to look for opportunities to volunteer. One of them is with my school’s ocean conservation club and also being a translator for Bye Bye Plastic Bags.
WHAT WAS THE DEFINING MOMENT THAT GOT YOU STARTED ON THIS PATH?
During the pandemic lockdown, apart from our school work, we were encouraged to find ways to volunteer and do social projects. One of them is a fellowship with Earth Echo International. It’s a US-based non-profit, and it was for marine protected areas, which is something that I’ve never heard of before. This coincided with a special trip that I made with my sister to Nusa Penida, and that was my first visit to a marine protected area where I basically saw how beautiful coral reefs were. It sparked my curiosity and showed me how beautiful the ocean could be, but also the realization that by 2050, within our lifetime, the majority of the coral reefs could be wiped out. I decided to try and understand what it means to protect the ocean legally, but also what does it entail when you want to protect something? And I realized there’s this
whole conservation world where something means that you can’t destroy—like there’s a spectrum of it, obviously, like No Take Zones. It eventually led me to the policy advocacy side.
COULD YOU TELL US ABOUT 30X30 INDONESIA, THE MOVEMENT YOU STARTED IN HIGH SCHOOL?
Through the EarthEcho International fellowship, I launched 30×30 Indonesia, which is still running today. It started as a campaign, a movement to share this 30×30 goal (a worldwide initiative for governments to designate 30% of Earth’s land and ocean as protected areas by 2030). We started very small with the communities I work with, already within the schools, but also across other schools and sports communities. But then I decided to take it forward and just bring that movement to a whole different level, because we wanted to try and understand what it means to affect the environment. We ended up establishing an artificial reef in northeast Bali through seed funding, through different projects, and trying to share what it means to protect 30×30 through hands-on initiatives, trying to bring people to an environment. We planted mangroves, and we were still running a coral restoration site. And basically, more on the environmental education side and connecting people back to the ocean environment.
Read more of Brigitta Gunawan’s mission to save the seas in MEGA’s MARCH 2025 issue, now available on Readly, Magzter, Press Reader and Zinio.
Images courtesy of BRIGITTA MARIA ANDREA GUNAWAN. UN Ocean Conference photo by KIERA WORTH. Global Citizen photo by LAWRENCE FURZY.
