As hands-on reef restoration captures the world’s attention, Wakatobi makes the case for a simpler idea: protecting marine ecosystems before they need rebuilding can achieve meaningful results on a far greater scale.
A Reputation Built Over Three Decades
I took my first breath underwater at the age of twelve. Since then, much of my life, personally and professionally, has revolved around the ocean. Like many divers who care about it, I’ve absorbed years’ worth of online imagery showing me what its destruction looks like, but also what saving it looks like.
Entangled animals. Bleached corals. Plastic everywhere, and then some.
Thankfully, hopeful images pop up now and again, too: a diver carefully holding a tiny coral fragment, ready to plant it back onto a damaged reef. Jason Momoa getting his hands wet with the Coral Gardeners in French Polynesia. Or Coral Gardeners founder, Titouan Bernicot, appearing in a Rolex campaign alongside some of the world’s most recognizable environmental advocates.
And for good reason. They offer something the ocean and its advocates desperately need: hope.
The reach is difficult to ignore. Coral Gardeners now counts more than one million followers on Instagram. In 2019, a single social-media campaign reportedly reached more than 100 million people, helping grow the organization’s Instagram following to half a million almost overnight (Coral Gardeners, n.d.). A few years later, Bernicot would join the Rolex family of Testimonees, bringing his conservation work to an even larger global audience.
“In an industry so often dominated by images of loss, there is something inspiring about being able to watch something vulnerable regain its strength.”
Coral gardening is tangible, optimistic and easy to understand. A fragment is planted. Then it grows. A diver can return and see the difference. In an industry so often dominated by images of loss, there is something inspiring about being able to watch something vulnerable regain its strength.
Nuanced Conversations About Conservation
Working inside the dive industry, at a resort with a long conservation record, I’ve been exposed to the more nuanced conversations around what saving the ocean really looks like. Back when I had just joined Wakatobi’s marketing team, I was speaking with a renowned underwater photojournalist when he offered an opinion that stuck with me. Coral restoration, he told me, is worthwhile work, but it operates at a different scale. Next to Wakatobi’s Collaborative Reef Conservation Program, he argued, the difference in conservation impact wasn’t even close.
“Really?” I thought.
I didn’t dismiss his opinion. Quite the opposite. He had been diving longer than I had been alive, documenting reefs around the world and watching many of them change firsthand. I respected him and the wealth of knowledge that came with that experience. I just didn’t yet understand the full context.
Enter Wakatobi.
For first-time guests arriving at Wakatobi, conservation can appear suspiciously effortless. And for a diver whose first underwater experience is Wakatobi, it may be difficult to appreciate just how unusual the reef there actually is.
Some of my favorite moments in Wakatobi’s waters have been spent with resident marine biologist Julia Mellers. On the occasional morning before the workday began — especially toward the end of our time on site, when we were trying to squeeze in as much of the reef as we could before leaving — Julia and I would slip onto the House Reef for a swim, just as the first light began waking both the island and the reef below.
Along the House Reef wall, thousands of tiny fish schooled and glittered in the rising sun. Bumphead parrotfish drifted beneath us. Large green sea turtles began stirring as we swam our laps overhead. If we were lucky, a resident giant trevally might cruise past. At the surface, juvenile needlefish hovered in the shallows, while clouds of redtooth triggerfish filled the water around us. Even before broad daylight, the reef was visibly, and noisily, alive.
Yet, there are no coral nurseries to tour at Wakatobi. No fragments waiting to be planted. No obvious intervention for a guest to point at and say, “There — that is the conservation project!” In fact, there is very little underwater to suggest that what you are witnessing is the result of an active conservation program at all.
And that is precisely the point.
At Wakatobi, leaving the reef alone is the conservation project. Rather than rebuilding an ecosystem after it has been lost, the philosophy Wakatobi was founded on is deceptively simple: protect what is already functioning, reduce the pressures placed upon it, and give the reef the breathing room to sustain and regenerate itself.
“By reducing pressures such as destructive fishing and giving surrounding communities an economic stake in ongoing protection, the reef is given something rewarding: the opportunity to heal and function on its own.”
After 30 years in operation, Wakatobi has helped protect more than 70 kilometers of coral reef through its Collaborative Reef Conservation Program. At the heart of the model is a simple economic proposition: make protecting a reef more valuable than exploiting it. Agreements with local communities provide economic benefits in exchange for protecting the reefs rather than fishing them, while dive tourism generates livelihoods tied directly to keeping the ecosystem healthy. Today, Wakatobi employs more than 450 people, including former fishermen who now play a role in protecting the reefs. As the protected area has expanded, so too has the economics built around its protection.
The idea may be simple, but maintaining it is anything but passive. By reducing pressures such as destructive fishing and giving surrounding communities an economic stake in ongoing protection, the reef is given room to heal and function on its own.
That, perhaps, is the real art of leaving it be. The reef already knows how to grow. Our job is to create the conditions that give it that chance.
Insights from Wakatobi’s Resident Marine Biologist
Of course, if I were going to question what meaningful reef conservation really looks like, there was no better person to ask than Julia. When I told her about the idea for this article, she had plenty to say.
“The idea of inaction is intrinsically less appealing than action,” she wrote me, reflecting on why coral gardening — although valuable in its own right — can be so much easier to see, understand and celebrate.
“A guest at Wakatobi might only notice the benefits of conservation after five or ten years, when they return and see the same incredible biodiversity they had witnessed before,” Julia explained. “But a diver who plants a fragment of coral might return the next year, to the same destination, and see that the same fragment has doubled in size.”
Therein lies the appeal. One approach offers something you can see growing before your eyes. The other asks you to appreciate what has remained.
But Julia is careful not to dismiss the value of restoration altogether.
“It is important that we don’t think of coral gardening itself as a substitute for protection. The two approaches serve different, but important functions,” she explains.
As any good scientist should, Julia is careful not to overstate what the scientific data can support. But even with that necessary restraint, the difference in scale between coral restoration and ecosystem-level protection is difficult to ignore. A 2020 systematic review of more than 350 coral restoration case studies found that the median restored area was just 100 square meters. Nearly 60 percent of the projects focused primarily on fast-growing branching corals, while 60 percent reported less than 18 months of monitoring (Boström-Einarsson et al., 2020).
These figures do not suggest that restoration is ineffective. In areas where reefs have already been severely damaged and natural recovery is unlikely, intervention can be especially valuable. Still, rebuilding patches of coral and protecting the ecological processes of an entire reef are fundamentally different challenges.
For Julia, biodiversity is a crucial part of the equation.
“If you have a reef with high species diversity and richness, it is unlikely that any single disturbance will kill the entire range of species present. Even if a disturbance wipes out some species, recruits can fill the newly opened niches,” she explains.
In other words, greater biodiversity in a marine ecosystem gives a reef more ways to bounce back. On a reef where diversity has been largely lost, there are fewer options for species survival and recovery. Growing new coral can help restore what has been damaged, but growing coral alone does not automatically bring back the beneficial complexity of an entire ecosystem.
“Growing new coral can help restore what has been damaged, but growing coral alone does not automatically bring back the beneficial complexity of an entire ecosystem.”
This becomes particularly important as reefs face pressures that cannot be controlled locally.
“Multiple environmental stressors reduce the ability of an ecosystem to both withstand and recover from disturbance,” Julia explains. Then she offers hope: “But single stressors are more manageable.”
At the scale of an entire reef ecosystem, Julia is clear about the limitations of coral restoration.
“The scale of manual intervention is orders of magnitude too small to achieve meaningful recovery or maintenance of intact reefs,” she says. “This requires protection from further damage and reduction of additional stressors.”
This is where Wakatobi’s conservation model comes into focus. For three decades, the program has worked with surrounding communities to reduce the local pressures it can influence — particularly destructive fishing — through agreements that keep fishing pressure off the protected reefs while communities continue to fish elsewhere. In doing so, the program helps protect a much larger, functioning reef ecosystem.
“Wakatobi’s model cannot shield the reef from every threat it faces, but it can give it a better chance to face those threats on its own.”
Wakatobi’s model cannot shield the reef from every threat it faces, but it can give it a better chance to face those threats on its own. Think of it almost like boosting the reef’s immune system: remove as many outside stressors as possible, and give the ecosystem a better chance of handling the ones you cannot control.
Where does this leave us as divers?
I’ve come to think that we, as travelers, have far more influence over the future of the reefs we love than we often realize.
Every time we spend money to dive, we are placing economic value on the ocean. So why not choose to spend that money somewhere that recognizes the value of protecting its greatest natural asset?
One of the greatest challenges facing marine conservation is that declaring an area “protected” does not necessarily make it so. Julia points to the prevalence of so-called “paper parks” — marine reserves that exist in designation, but where fishing and other pressures may continue because there is little incentive or capacity to actually protect them.
Real protection requires more than drawing boundaries on a map. It requires constant monitoring, community participation and, inevitably, a lot of funding. This is where dive tourism can become part of the solution.
“Every time we spend money to dive, we are placing economic value on the ocean. So why not choose to spend that money somewhere that recognizes the value of protecting its greatest natural asset?”
Look through guest testimonials and the same things appear again and again: warm staff, comforting and delicious food, and, of course, the diving. The Courtyard Residence adds its own team, chef and boat, so a family or small group can dive the reef on their own schedule.
But there is another side to all of that hospitality. Tourism at Wakatobi supports hundreds of local jobs and helps fund the conservation program itself.
And that is where we, as divers, come back into the equation.
A healthy reef makes for great diving. That experience keeps divers coming back, and their return helps fund the protection that keeps the reef healthy. It is a cycle that, quite simply, works.
As Julia rather perfectly put it, “the proof is in the pudding.” Divers do come back to Wakatobi.
One repeat guest, Kaye Richardson, first visited Wakatobi in 2007. Returning nearly two decades later, she wrote: “Wow, wow, wow! I was here in 2007, and it was spectacular then.” After traveling the world diving since 1992, her assessment of Wakatobi’s reefs today was wonderfully simple: “The diving! Unequaled — healthy reefs, abundant sea life.”
Kaye’s experience is not an isolated one. Wakatobi has guests who have returned two, five, even more times over the years. Of course, they return for the people, the service, the food and the feeling of familiarity that develops after so many visits. But they also return to dive a reef that remains intact at a time when healthy coral ecosystems are becoming increasingly precious.
And perhaps that is one of the most powerful measures of successful reef protection. A diver can return years later, descend onto the same reef and still find the biodiversity that made them fall in love with it in the first place.
That is worth traveling to see. And, importantly, it is worth protecting.
After 30 years, perhaps Wakatobi’s simplest conservation lesson is this: create the conditions for nature to do what it does best, and then have the patience and discipline to leave it be.
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Sources:
- Boström-Einarsson, L., et al. (2020). “Coral restoration – A systematic review of current methods, successes, failures and future directions.” PLOS ONE, 15(1), e0226631. PLOS ONE article
- Coral Gardeners. (n.d.). “Our Story.” Coral Gardeners – Our Story
