Coral Triangle Nature Nonprofits

The Coral Triangle is the centre of marine life on Earth. Spanning the waters of Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomons, and Timor-Leste, it holds more coral species, more reef fish, and more marine biodiversity than anywhere else, by a wide margin. If the ocean has a heart, it beats here.

It also feeds people, directly and at enormous scale. Hundreds of millions depend on these reefs and the fisheries they support, which makes the conservation problem inseparable from the food-security problem. Blast fishing, cyanide fishing, coastal development, and the steady heating of the sea are all pressing at once, and the mangroves and seagrass beds that buffer the reefs have been cleared for shrimp ponds across vast areas.

The organizations here build locally managed marine areas, because top-down protection does not work in a place where fishing is survival, restore mangrove and reef, and work with communities to make protection pay. The Coral Triangle is where the argument that conservation and human welfare are opposed goes to be disproved.