Restore Corals in French Polynesia

How the project works

Coral Gardeners began in 2017 on the island of Mo'orea in French Polynesia, started by a group of local surfers, fishers and free-divers who watched their home reef fade. What began as a handful of people replanting coral by hand has grown into one of the world's leading reef-restoration organisations, with a mission to plant one million climate-resilient corals.

The team works like gardeners of the sea. They identify resilient 'super corals' that have survived bleaching on the wild reef, take small fragments, and grow them in underwater nurseries in the sheltered lagoon. After roughly a year the young colonies are strong enough to be outplanted onto degraded reef, where they continue to grow and reproduce.

Diversity is central to the approach: more than 50 coral species, mostly fast-growing branching stony corals, are propagated so the restored reef rebuilds structure, shelter and ecological function rather than a monoculture. Fragments of the same colony are placed together so they fuse back into a single large, resilient coral.

Every coral can be adopted. Supporters choose an individual coral that the team plants and then follow its progress through the Reef App, while local youth are trained and employed as coral gardeners - keeping restoration in the hands of the community that depends on the reef.

Restoration is guided by data. Through CG Labs and its ReefOS platform, sensors, cameras and AI monitor coral growth, temperature and reef health in real time, so the team can track survival, respond to heat stress and continually improve their methods.

Since 2017 Coral Gardeners has planted more than 100,000 corals across French Polynesia and Fiji. Reefs shelter around a quarter of all marine species and protect island coastlines from storms - restoring them, alongside urgent climate action, gives these ecosystems and the communities that rely on them a fighting chance.