Over the past year, a dredger operated by Dutch company Van Oord cut through a coral reef off the coast of northern Mozambique, part of the construction of French oil and gas giant TotalEnergies’ troubled liquefied natural gas project in Cabo Delgado. Data scientists analyzing satellite imagery and vessel data have found that a massive chunk of coral has been dredged out of the ecologically sensitive reef.

The 32 islands of the Quirimbas Archipelago extend from the mouth of the Rovuma River, on the Mozambique-Tanzania border, to Pemba Bay in the south. The archipelago is home to a high number of endemic and threatened species, including coelacanths (Latimeria chalumnae), dugongs (Dugong dugon) and hawksbill (Eretmochelys imbricata) and green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas). Its coastal and littoral zone have estuaries and mangrove forests.

“Of all the tropical oceans, the Indian Ocean by the Mozambique Channel is the ocean with the highest surface temperature increase, so corals are under stress,” said Daniel Ribeiro from the environmental justice organization Justiça Ambiental (JA!). “The ability to recover after damage is much lower because of these factors.”

There are four major gas projects in the Rovuma Basin, including ENI’s Coral North floating liquefied natural gas project, which is the only one currently operational. TotalEnergies’ Mozambique LNG project was suspended in 2021, following an attack on facilities by insurgents. TotalEnergies and Exxon stopped work on their gas projects while regional troops joined the Mozambican army in battling the insurgents.

In October 2025, the French company announced it will lift the force majeure — the clause justifying the indefinite suspension of its operations due to a worsening security situation, a factor beyond its control — while Exxon’s Rovuma project is still awaiting final investment decisions. ENI is developing another LNG project, Coral South, mirroring its existing one.

Even while TotalEnergies’ project was suspended, locals observed work continuing along the proposed route of the Golfinho pipeline, which will channel gas from offshore fields to an export terminal on the Afungi Peninsula, Ribeiro said.

“Total and ExxonMobil will be putting pipelines all the way from the extraction points to the Afungi processing plant, and those pipelines are going through a very sensitive ecosystem,” he said.

Reefs stretch across the operating areas of all four gas projects in the North Mozambique Channel. Satellite images and vessel tracking show that the areas that have been dredged support a high diversity of species and are significant for the functioning of the ecosystems.

“Even though we see that they are trying to avoid highly sensitive areas, the pipeline is inevitably passing through these areas,” said Louis Goddard, an analyst from Data Desk, a U.K.-based group focusing on research on the fossil fuel industry. He noted that the sediment plumes from dredging work seem larger and more persistent than was anticipated in the project’s environmental impact assessment for the project.

In that EIA, TotalEnergies acknowledged that construction of the pipeline would require cutting through coral reefs and habitats. Even if the company’s proposed mitigation measures are taken, the damaged or destroyed reefs would take decades to recover. Due to limited data — there have been no benthic surveys made or a holistic coral species inventory — how fully they recover is uncertain, and some coral loss is unavoidable, the EIA states.

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  Satellite image from March 2025, showing dredging of coral reefs in the Quirimbas Archipelago, northern Mozambique. Image courtesy of Data Desk/Copernicus Sentinel-2.
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  Damaged coral will take decades to recover — some reefs may not recover at all. Image courtesy of Data Desk/Copernicus Sentinel-2.
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  Dredging operations seem to have deviated from plans set out in the EIA. Here a sediment plume extends more than 500m from cutter suction dredger vessel Artemis. Image courtesy of Data Desk/Planet.

A report published by JA! and other environmental organizations earlier this year concluded that the environmental impact assessments conducted for the Rovuma gas projects failed to consider the impacts on marine life. “No thorough, scientifically sound surveys were conducted on ecosystems and biodiversity in the terrestrial, near-shore or deep ocean areas affected,” the report says.

The NGOs warned that “dredging in Palma Bay will result in damage to sea grass beds and coral reefs which provide food and shelter to small and large marine creatures.”

Ribeiro added that the companies each assessed the potential disturbance their individual projects would cause, but failed to account for the cumulative impact of developing four major projects gas in close proximity to each other.

“My impression from the project docs is that the developers were caught flat-footed by the extent of the coral and other rich marine environments around the project site and face a pretty tricky task to build anything without significant damage,” Goddard said.

The Mozambican government, TotalEnergies and Van Oord had not responded to Mongabay’s request for comment by the time this article was published.

Banner image: A coral grouper in a Mozambique coral reef. Image by FloT974 via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

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