Coral reefs directly support more than 500 million people globally, usually in poor countries. More than 40 years ago, scientists initiated the discussion on coral reefs habitat destruction. Scientific research has covered various impacts on coral reefs including human pressures and climate change. Evidently ocean warming and acidification emerged as the main threats in the past decades.
Currently, tropical coral reefs and their community are expected to face a tremendous increasing risk as global-warming raises. Such emerged combined stressors (human and climatic drivers) lead to slow recovery of corals with expectations of shift in species biodiversity and composition. Hence, coral reefs rehabilitation interventions have strikingly increased over the past decade.
These interventions are carried through both, advanced science-based projects (such as coral microbiome engineering, ecological processes recruitment as well as community-based projects. The later occurs because of poor communication among the main three parties in charge (practitioners, MPAs managers with policymakers, and scientists) which in turn has led to unsatisfactory results in these rehabilitation attempts. The analysis of these results here revealed that most deficiencies are related to projects design.
Engagement of these respective parties in a scientific framework through “adopting a cautionary coral reefs rehabilitation strategy” will manage the general steps of adaptive decision making, and elude knowledge gaps that exist in certain drivers (Bioecological and Socio-economic) and common deficiencies in projects design. This will help quantifying rehabilitation measures and shaping these improvised directions for more efficient rehabilitation attempts.
Avoiding this strategy is highly likely to result in another direct human impact on coral reefs in the Anthropocene.
In this review, we summarize the story of past gains with evidence to new shaping of rehabilitative intervention directions for more resolutely efficient attempts. This is represented via simple pathway diagrams, and updated map which indicate the relationship between attempts objective and outcomes and charts showing drivers for success of coral rehabilitation. We attempt to answer the following question: How necessary is it to have a unified coral reefs rehabilitation cautionary strategy with an action plan?