Abstract Summary
Coral nurseries have expanded throughout the Caribbean, and many now have the ability to outplant tens of thousands of corals annually. Nevertheless, these efforts are inadequate to address coral losses from bleaching, disease, hurricanes and other stressors due to resource and capacity limitations, and challenges in propagating slower-growing coral species. Dive operators recognize the need to rehabilitate damaged reefs, as it is in their long term marketing interests and they benefit when their customers are aware that they are proactively conserving their reefs. Yet, reef restoration is often seen as prohibitively expensive, technically difficult, and beyond the scope of these businesses. Through adoption of a business model that encourages dive operators to rehabilitate reefs as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR), restoration practitioners can work with these operations to establish coral nurseries adjacent to reefs frequented by tourists, and transfer the knowledge, care and ownership of the nurseries to those businesses. By promoting low-tech, low-cost, “adopt a reef” coral nursery programs, tourism enterprises will be more engaged in coral reef conservation, and can use their marketing and CSR leverage to expand awareness of and support for these efforts, thereby increasing the scale of reef restoration. This approach can transform the marketing benefits of enterprise tourism CSR into a framework to expand reef restoration with mutual benefits to 1) management agencies attempting to optimize resource integrity through active rehabilitation, 2) enterprise partners by ensuring customer satisfaction with their operations, 3) restoration practitioners by increasing the commercial potential of coral restoration outplanting, and 4) local communities and recreational divers through increased awareness and community engagement in restoration work.
