Sustainable Financing of Coral Regeneration

Client: ORRAA

Location: Maldives, Mexico, Palau and the Philippines

Objective: Coral reefs provide immense ecological, social and economic value, yet are declining rapidly and require substantially greater levels of finance to support their long-term resilience. ORRAA, through the Coral Reef Regeneration Co-Lab, commissioned a study to identify how sustainable finance and insurance can be mobilised for coral reef ‘regeneration’ across four countries. The focus is deliberately broader than conventional coral restoration, considering the full set of interventions and enabling conditions needed to sustain diverse, functioning reef ecosystems under a changing climate.

Our role: Sustain Value is delivering the project in partnership with Rare. We have developed a spectrum of reef regeneration activities and a typology of 23 potential finance and insurance instruments spanning grants, fiscal mechanisms, market-based approaches, regulation, debt and equity, and risk finance. Each country is being assessed against two dimensions: its priority reef regeneration needs and the enabling conditions for finance. All instruments will be screened at a high level before prioritising some for deeper assessment. Sustain Value is leading the Maldives and Mexico analyses, with Rare leading Palau and the Philippines, supported by literature review, expert consultation and targeted stakeholder interviews.

Outcome: The project is ongoing and will culminate in a White Paper and presentation for ORRAA and Co-Lab partners. The outputs will provide practical country-level financing diagnostics and implementation pathways, identifying which instruments are most promising, what would need to be true for them to operate at meaningful scale, and the actions required from governments, practitioners, investors and funders. A cross-country synthesis will also identify transferable lessons, financing gaps and opportunities for combining different instruments into broader reef regeneration financing architectures.