Plenary 2

A key challenge for reef restoration interventions or initiatives is how to scale up from micro or site-scale projects into regional scale projects. This applies to current and emerging intervention practices such as coral gardening or the deployment of artificial substrate and also those being developed in RRAP. A bottleneck for both current and emerging practices of intervention is on-water infrastructure and appropriately skilled human resources. To this end, the ability to upscale will be dependent upon the development of new approaches that are more labour and infrastructure efficient and have the ability to mobilise non-research provider labour and resources. The tourism sector is an obvious sector to participate in current and future reef restoration projects. Tourism operators have on-water infrastructure, including boats and crews, are already stewards of reefs and in some cases already participating in reef restoration projects. However, this does not automatically mean that every tourism operator will wish to, or have the capacity to, participate in every possible intervention. Based on our learnings from projects such as the Boats4Corals project in the Whitsundays, and international examples, this talk will discuss the essential and desirable conditions for, as well as barriers to, effective tourism industry participation in reef interventions.