Coral Reef Alliance

Our mission is to save the world's coral reefs.

Coral reefs support over 500 million people around the world by providing food, income, coastal protection, and more. They provide over $375 billion per year in goods and services. And despite only covering 0.1% of the earth’s surface, they contain the highest number of species of any ecosystem besides rainforests.

We work at local, regional, and global levels to keep coral reefs healthy, so they can adapt to climate change and survive for generations to come. As one of the largest global NGOs focused exclusively on protecting coral reefs, the Coral Reef Alliance (CORAL) has used cutting-edge science and community engagement for more than 30 years to reduce direct threats to reefs and to promote scalable and effective solutions for their protection.

Our Programs

Western Caribbean: We partner with local communities to reduce local threats to reefs, including overfishing and wastewater pollution, and build regional collaborations.

Hawaiian Islands: We demonstrate how to use native species to stabilize sediment on land before it enters the ocean, and we support the state’s goal to transition away from ineffective wastewater treatment systems.

Global Conservation Science: We develop conservation resources based on innovative science and give conservation practitioners around the world easy ways to incorporate evolution into MPA network planning.

To create the conditions in which corals can adapt to climate change, we work at three different scales:

Local
We keep corals healthy so they can adapt to their changing environment by partnering with communities who depend on coral reefs for food and income, and working with them to effectively address local stressors, such as overfishing and land-based pollution.

Regional
We protect connected areas of reef to allow evolutionary adaptation to occur through the movement of coral larvae by ensuring that marine spatial planning efforts protect the diversity required to fuel evolution, and by establishing collaborations to build momentum to address key threats.

Global
We ensure conservation planning around the world protects the diversity of corals required for evolutionary adaptation by building alliances across the conservation community and providing tools and guidance that can help others implement adaptation-smart conservation.