[NOTICE] EPA announced the availability of the final report, Action Plan for Restoration of Coral Reef Coastal Protection Services: Case Study Example and Workbook, Supplement to a Manager’s Guide to Coral Reef Restoration Planning & Design on the EPA website.

Citation:

U.S. EPA. Action Plan for Restoration of Coral Reef Coastal Protection Services: Case Study Example and Workbook, Supplement to a Manager’s Guide to Coral Reef Restoration Planning & Design. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, DC, EPA/600/R-21/306, 2022.

Impact/Purpose:

A Manager's Guide to Coral Reef Restoration Planning & Design supports coral reef managers--together with their partners and stakeholders—in developing restoration projects for coral reefs in their locations. The Guide Workbook is a user-friendly companion to the Guide that provides a template to document the information used and decisions made during planning to create a Restoration Action Plan. As an example of the process, this report presents a hypothetical coral reef restoration project, located in the Pacific region, which focuses on the goal of improving the ecosystem service of coastal protection. The material in this case study is intended to support users of the Guide in creating their own Workbooks and Action Plans, tailored to their own goals and reef locations.  

Description:

Coral reefs—which provide valued ecosystem services such as fisheries, coastal protection, and tourism—are threatened by the effects of increased sea surface temperatures, sea level rise, and intensifying storms. These large-scale stressors are interacting with local stressors such as pollution, overfishing, and recreational misuse to drive ongoing and accelerating declines in coral reef ecosystems. Thus, there is a rising urgency to design and implement climate change adaptation measures that account for, and adjust to, the combined effects of climate change and local stressors in coral reef protection and restoration efforts.

The action plan, example case study, and workbook found in this report demonstrate a structured process for integrating climate-smart design considerations into restoration planning using A Manager’s Guide to Coral Reef Restoration Planning and Design. The focus is a hypothetical coral reef restoration project that has a goal of recovering nature-based coastal protection services using restoration interventions. The intent is to provide natural resource managers and decision makers with a completed example of how to use the Guide workbook to inform a draft action plan, centering on the topic of coastal protection as a burgeoning area of interest in coral reef science and management communities. As a hypothetical case study, this report provides a starting point for more detailed planning that would occur in specific places. The workbook, together with the action plan, also can serve as a valuable record of the planning thought process and a living document for adaptive management, to be updated through time as improved information becomes available.

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