“When I think about my grandfather, and I think about his legacy. It’s more a legacy of problem solving than anything else,” says Philippe Cousteau Jr, founder of Voyacy Regen, NGO Earth Echo, renowned story-teller and filmmaker. 

“I think about myself fundamentally as a problem solver, and we face very serious problems in the ocean. It’s no surprise, and one of those problems is the wholesale collapse of the most biodiverse and one of, if not the most important ecosystem on the planet, and that is coral reefs,” Cousteau says. 

Carrying his prestigious family legacy forward, Cousteau sees a solution to coral reef collapse in blue tech, through his company Voyacy Regen. The project aims for the large-scale building of 2,500 kilometres by 2050 in order to restore large swathes of ecosystems, protect the coastal communities that rely on them, and strengthen global climate resilience.

To date, humanity has restored a total of just one square kilometre of coral reefs.

Cousteau is acutely aware of the lack of financial investment in environmental initiatives – particularly in the ocean space. And that lack of investment sits alongside increasing government anxiety about the hundreds of billions of dollars of damage caused by storm surges, hurricanes and typhoons,

Making projects financially viable investments – despite sitting far from the romanticised ocean explorer image existing of the Cousteau name in popular culture – is in Phillipe’s view, critical to actually enacting the climate-focused projects that can turn the tide in the fight against global warming. 

“The idea that markets and money are the enemy is naive and counterproductive. I would love to live in a utopian world where everybody sings Kumbaya and we all do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do,” he says.

“I believe in protecting nature for nature’s sake. If the majority of people, markets, companies and governments believed that we would not be in the situation that we’re in,” he adds gravely.

His approach then pairs a financially pragmatic approach to conservation, with a genuine, deep-rooted love for the ocean and a drive to protect the blue planet for generations to come.

“If coral reefs do indeed disappear, it will be the first mass extinction of an entire ecosystem since the dinosaurs – wholly human caused,” he explains, “Children, when they are our age, will really only know coral reefs and picture books from the past. That is not an option for me.”

Despite the overarching message that corals are doomed from a heat perspective, Cousteau is fiercely optimistic about the potential large-scale coral reef projects will have on the future of these ecosystems. 

He’s seen firsthand how the heat tolerant corals he’s raised, propagated and placed back in the ocean have survived large-scale coral bleaching events, like the one in Florida Keys in 2023.

This message does not always break through in the fast-paced news cycle dominant in our media, which he believes has cultivated very little trust on behalf of the public. 

“For too long,” he says, “We have been the movement of doom and gloom, of deprivation, of you’re bad. Don’t do that. Instead, we need to be a movement of hope.”

Staying true to his Cousteau problem solving legacy, he adds: “We have to combat that through proof points of success. The storytelling should be focused around hope, positivity, opportunity and how it can affect people’s lives.”

Click here for more from the Oceanographic Newsroom.