New interventions are needed to help sustain coral reefs under climate change. In a warming world, restoration and adaptation interventions can benefit reefs and people. However, the extent and nature of those benefits will depend on R&D and deployment choices made in the face of opportunity, costs, risks, and uncertainty.
We present the Adaptive Dynamic Reef Intervention Algorithms (ADRIA). ADRIA is a decision-support platform for guided reef restoration and adaptation. In short, ADRIA informs intervention-deployment decisions in complex environmental, ecological, and socio-economic settings. Users engage with ADRIA to set the decision criteria, spatial objectives, time horizons, risk tolerance, and performance metrics. Outputs are the scope for one or more new interventions to support reef-ecosystem services relative to the status quo for different climate-change scenarios.
We illustrate ADRIA as a decision-support tool in a case study on the Great Barrier Reef. Specifically, we show how the guided deployment of warm-adapted corals and localized shading can provide scope to support tourism, fishing, and non-use (existence) benefits. Simulated deployment can be guided by reef- or site-scale connectivity, heat stress, wave stress, coral cover, coral carrying capacity, management zones, costs, logistics, and a range of other criteria. We show that the realization of those benefits depends critically on the speed and effectiveness of R&D, and both early and guided intervention deployment. Outcomes are highly sensitive to intervention efficacy and assumptions for the rate of natural adaptation. While guided intervention using ADRIA may help create significant returns on intervention investments for reefs and people in the short and medium term, long-term sustained outcomes are only possible when combined with climate change mitigation.