ProCoReef

ProCoReef offers ecotourism activities to enable individuals and companies to participate in coral-reef restoration. It aims at creating alliances with companies that can contribute to financing coral-reef restoration. Through the implementation of its regenerative tourism business model, the company promotes the restoration of coastal marine ecosystems, enhances local economies and helps coastal communities adapt to climate change. By offering coral restoration as a tourism activity, the company offers the public the unique experience of planting corals.

Companies are also able to finance 'planting days'. The benefits such as ecosystem restoration, environmental education, supporting the local economy and carbon sequestration are reported back to the company and can be used in company marketing, voluntary compensation or social and environmental corporate responsibility. The aim is for reef restoration to become self-sustaining and not only an activity for experts or the conservation community. The pilot project is in Isla Fuerte, a Colombian island in the Caribbean.

The company is looking for financing to conduct pilot tests in other coastal areas to enable the standardisation of processes and protocols. It hopes to make replicability possible at any tourist destination with degraded ecosystems.The company is also working on the creation of a financial instrument, the "Blue Fund", that will enable the private sector to invest in the restoration of coral reefs as a business-sustainability strategy.

This instrument will gather resources to develop coral-reef recovery and fund research to demonstrate the carbon-sequestration potential of these ecosystems. ProCoReef hopes to pioneer the creation of a standard certification for blue-carbon credits in corals and to have made possible the issuance of the first blue-carbon credit for the removal of carbon from the atmosphere by coral reefs.

The founder, Olga Lucía Caro Jácome, recently won The World Ocean Initiative’s Women and the ocean: Changemakers challenge, sponsored by The Nature Conservancy.

The challenge showcases leading female innovators working to develop business solutions to achieve ocean-related sustainability.