Building resilience in coastal communities

Can a coalition of public authorities, NGOs and locals rescue a reef?

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Coral reefs buffer coastal communities against hurricanes and tropical storms. But storms can also harm reefs by breaking coral colonies or smothering them in sand. Swift coral restoration and repair can reduce the damage.

With the Swiss Re Foundation’s support, in 2017 The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and partners began training brigades of local volunteers in Mexico to repair and restore storm-damaged portions of the Mesoamerican Reef and engaging local government, NGOs and businesses in reef conservation. Working with Swiss Re’s Public Sector Solutions, TNC also explored parametric insurance as a source of financing.

When this pilot proved successful, we teamed up with TNC to scale the approach in all four countries bordering the reef: Belize, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. This includes setting up governance and support structures and a post-storm response protocol along with brigades and financing.

Our grants to TNC focused on the brigade training and development of the governance structures needed to protect natural infrastructure like reefs. This is the story of the scale-up in Belize.

Fernando Secaira, TNC’s climate and risk resilience initiative in Mexico

Fernando Secaira of TNC oversaw the pilot in Mexico and later worked with national ocean and reef management agencies during the scale-up to put governance structures in place and to get the brigades up and running.

Here Fernando highlights why the Mesoamerican Reef matters and what was achieved and learned. Project implementation was similar across countries.

Alicia Eck-Nunez, Belize Fisheries Department

Belize’s newly established governance and support structures, response protocol, brigades and insurance-backed financing were first put to the test by Hurricane Lisa in November 2022, which struck with winds of 135 miles per hour. Alicia Eck-Nunez, Marine Reserves Operations Manager of the Belize Fisheries Department, who oversees the operations of the country’s marine reserves, coordinated the post-storm response. Here she reflects on what went well and what could be done better in the future.

Watch full video Alicia Eck-Nunez, Belize Fisheries Department

Victor Faux, Fragments of Hope

Victor Faux, a coral restoration practitioner with the community-based organisation Fragments of Hope and resident of the coastal village Placencia, volunteers as a brigade trainer and member. He’s one of the nearly 50% of Belizeans who depend on the reef for coastal protection, their livelihoods or both. Here Victor shares why he cares about the reef and how the brigades help conserve it.

Watch full video Victor Faux, Fragments of Hope

Eliceo Cobb, Turneffe Atoll Sustainability Association (TASA)

"TASA plays a key role in implementing our region’s reef response plan. This consists of a detailed protocol as well as training and preparation of the volunteer brigades, which include people from conservation NGOs, local communities and government partners. As Education and Outreach Coordinator/Operations Manager for Turneffe, I serve on the storm coordinating committee created through this project with TNC and the Swiss Re Foundation. I also lead one of the brigades that conduct post-storm assessment and restoration. After Hurricane Lisa, the good collaboration among stakeholders proved vital to our implementation of the response plan.”

The MAR Insurance Programme is a parametric insurance-based mechanism to fund rapid response to hurricane-driven degradation of the Mesoamerican Reef. Because coverage is triggered according to pre-agreed guidelines, when a hurricane hits an insured area, MAR Fund can immediately release funds to support post-storm reef response. After Hurricane Lisa, the payout was USD 175 000, and funds for the response were administered by TASA.

Reef areas covered by the MAR Insurance Programme (2023 Atlantic hurricane season).

The programme can be scaled to other geographies, perils and ecosystems thanks to its reliance on globally available hazard data and its compatibility with existing organisational networks and environmental funds.

Coral reefs embody nature’s resilience. But for nature-based coastal protections like reefs to do their job, they need people’s help. Our five-year collaboration with TNC demonstrates how homegrown approaches and coalitions can be scaled up to help whole regions tackle major environmental challenges.

Perhaps the most important insight from this project is the need to help businesses and private citizens recognise the link between a threatened natural asset and their own interests. TNC’s approach boils down to making the case for investment, engaging the community and having a solution ready before seeking financing to mitigate risk. Insurance-based funding can be considered sustainable only when the premiums are priced at true value and the policyholders are non-philanthropic.

Emboldened by this collaboration, the Swiss Re Foundation is resolved both to build local capacities and to fund nature-based solutions for coastal resilience. The current lack of solid, mature projects has led us to support early-stage entrepreneurs, initiatives moving from the feasibility stage to implementation and an accelerator that offers technical assistance and investment.

We can’t afford to wait for perfect solutions to appear. Until governments and private capital start funding nature-based solutions at scale, we see a critical role for the Foundation to play as a philanthropy in incubating and accelerating efforts to build coastal resilience.

Impact in Numbers

  • 181

    post-storm responders, 17 of them trainers, with improved knowledge of coral reef assessment and restoration and organised into a total 14 brigades across the Mesoamerican Reef

  • 495 km

    of Mesoamerican Reef coastline protected

  • Governance structures

    established to guide post-storm response in Mexico, Belize and Honduras by October 2022 and in Guatemala after the grant period

​Learn more about the project

Explore The Nature Conservancy: Helping nature help itself

Picture courtesy

The copyright for all images and videos displayed lies with Nahún Rodríguez/Fairpicture, Jennifer Adler/TNC, and Christian Bobst

IMPACT STORY ARCHIVES