I’m in the Maldives when news comes through that in 2024, the world breached the 1.5oC warming limit agreed at the Paris climate conference of 2015. This grim milestone came sooner than even pessimistic climate scientists anticipated, challenging their models and triggering speculation of planetary tipping points crossed. The timing of the announcement is apt, because I am at a conference in the Maldives on the future of coral restoration, convened by the Soneva Foundation Coral Restoration Programme.

Tropical coral reefs, the setting for so many wonderful images in Oceanographic, are on borrowed time. According to many experts, they represent the first major global tipping point that will be crossed (perhaps already has been) as the world heats up. Corals like it warm, but not too warm it turns out. Temperatures only 1oC above the normal maximum, sustained for a couple of months or more, cause corals to bleach white and then die in their masses. 

The Maldives lost 91% of its coral in 1998, the first worldwide marine heatwave, and has been hit with further calamity twice more since then. Taken together, the world’s reefs have lost nearly half their living coral since 1997. On the present trajectory, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects near total coral loss by 2100. 

Confronted by such losses, hundreds of projects have sprung up to rebuild reefs across virtually every country where corals live. The efforts span community-led initiatives to lavishly funded hi-tech exercises of research institutes and governments. Our conference represents a meeting of minds between scientists, restoration practitioners, finance and policy experts. We’re here to ask troubling questions: is coral restoration capable of saving coral reefs, and is there enough finance to expand the work to meaningful scales? The answers to those questions are no, not in its present form, and no. 

Coral restoration to date has largely been intent on putting back what has been lost. Transplanted or propagated corals are typically attached to reefs or artificial structures in intensive and expensive projects that cover hectares at most. The results can be as impressive as they are limited in area, with rapid recovery of living coral cover, supporting abundant fish, and providing important services natural reefs provide, like upward growth and shoreline protection. But success is often short-lived as restoration sites succumb to the very conditions that killed corals in the first place.

According to meeting participants, there is a better way. Reef restoration must reinvent itself as regeneration, with a firm focus on the future instead of the past. We must strive to find and propagate heat resistant corals likely to survive a more torrid world, and develop heat resistance in others using the tools of selective breeding, probiotics, and perhaps genetic manipulation. We must assist the spread of tougher corals using translocation and assisted migration. And we must include in regeneration efforts a wider range of marine life, beyond corals, chosen for their ability to survive and even thrive under altered future conditions.