Meet Coral Vita – A Social Enterprise Working To Preserve Coral Reefs For Future Generations

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Below is our recent interview with Sam Teicher, Co-Founder & Chief Reef Officer of Coral Vita:

Q: What is Coral Vita? For those who have never heard of it, tell us something more?

A: Coral Vita is a social enterprise working to preserve coral reefs for future generations. Coral reefs are known to be one of the most magical ecosystems on Earth, but many people don’t realize how important they are. Found in over 100 countries and territories, they sustain 25% of marine life and the livelihoods of up to one billion people. They also conservatively generate $30 billion annually by powering tourism economies, underpinning fisheries, and protecting coastlines by reducing wave energy by ~97%. But half of global coral reefs are dead and over 90% are on track to die by 2050, threatening biodiversity and these essential benefits.

While the best thing to do for coral reefs is to stop killing them by solving for climate change, pollution, and overfishing, novel adaptation solutions are urgently needed. That’s why we launched Coral Vita. We incorporate breakthrough methods to grow coral in months instead of decades (microfragmenting) while strengthening their resilience to threats like warming oceans (assisted evolution). As we grow coral to restore dying reefs, we use a unique commercial model to support our work. Considering the benefits reefs provide, we sell reef restoration as a service to customers like resorts, developers, coastal insurers, governments, corporate sponsors, and more. Simultaneously, our land-based coral farms serve as revenue-generating tourism attractions (as well as education centers for local communities). By doing holistic coral farming while getting people to pay to restore the reefs they depend on, we work to unlock critically-needed funding to support ecosystem-scale restoration. Ultimately, we envision large-scale coral farms in every nation with reefs.

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Q: What are some of the real-world results people can expect with your restoration solutions?

A: Coral farming has existed for decades, and a host of scientists, NGOs, and communities around the world have demonstrated the viability of revitalizing reef health in the right conditions through restoration. From boosting coral cover in degraded reefs to boosting surrounding marine life abundance and diversity, reef restoration provides a range of benefits.

At Coral Vita’s pilot coral farm in Freeport, Grand Bahama, we are able to control the growth conditions in our tanks to both optimize for coral health and acclimatize them for predicted future oceans using assisted evolution. For example, we can adjust the temperature and stress-harden coral so that they survive better when outplanted as ocean conditions deteriorate over time. Through microfragmenting, accelerating coral growth rates not only improves the affordability of restoration but also unlocks important species diversity. Most traditional coral farming projects grow a handful of fast-growing species, leaving out slower-growing but important ones. At the same time, we also engage in the annual coral spawning event, which also lets us increase the genetic diversity of coral for restoration projects.

Q: What’s the best thing about Coral Vita that people might not know about?

A: Our team. We’ve got such incredible, passionate, and determined people that make our efforts viable. From coral scientists to aquaculture experts to local technicians to entrepreneurs to educators, we have a team that shows up every day both excited to care for marine life and committed to ensuring that reefs and the communities who depend on them have a future.

Q: You’ve recently raised $2 Million in Seed funding; can you tell us something more?

A: After launching our pilot farm in May 2019, we had an incredible summer before Grand Bahama was hit by the catastrophic Hurricane Dorian. We grew 24 native coral species (compared to the 3-5 species typically grown in Caribbean restoration projects), successfully engaged in captive coral breeding (it naturally takes ~1M eggs to produce 1 adult coral in the wild – we lowered the ratio at our farm to 100:1), had nearly 1000 tourists at students visit the farm, and were negotiating restoration service contracts with local developers.

After engaging in humanitarian relief efforts in Fall 2019 and rebuilding our pilot damaged by Hurricane Dorian by March 2020 (just in time for Covid19), Coral Vita resumed operations. With the importance of coral reef health against the climate crisis underscored even further by our personal experience with the storm, we decided that we should take the next step forward and transform our pilot into a state-of-the-art facility.

The $2M lets us upgrade our facility, expand our staff, launch R&D projects, and provides runway for the next two years of growth. This funding will position Coral Vita to then start launching coral farms in new countries and help jumpstart a Restoration Economy to protect the ecosystems that sustain us all.

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Q: What is next on the roadmap for Coral Vita?

A: The next two years will be focused on scaling our impact, engaging in scientific experiments and R&D to improve farming and restoration efficacy, further proving out our business model, and determining where our next farm(s) will be. As we navigate through Covid19, we’ll continue expanding our Adopt-a-Coral campaign, which lets people anywhere in the world help bring reefs back to life by providing us with revenue while in-person tourism is on hold.