A new initiative in Hawaiʻi is bringing together marine scientists, Indigenous knowledge holders, and community leaders to restore 193 kilometers of degraded coral reefs along the western coast of the Big Island — one of the most ambitious reef restoration efforts in the state’s history.
At a glance
- Coral reef restoration: The Ākoʻakoʻa program targets 120 miles of reef off the Big Island’s west coast, backed by $25 million in funding from ASU, NOAA, Hawaiʻi’s Division of Aquatic Resources, and the Dorrance Family Foundation.
- Indigenous conservation: The initiative explicitly draws on traditional Hawaiian knowledge, including the concept of Mālama I Ka ʻĀina — caring for and respecting the land — as a core framework alongside Western science.
- Coral propagation facility: A new research and coral cultivation center in Kailua-Kona will support both scientific inquiry into coral health and the hands-on growing of new corals for reef restoration.
Why reefs off the Big Island need help
Hawaiʻi’s coral reefs have been in steep decline for roughly 50 years. Pollution, overfishing, and climate-driven ocean warming have pushed reef communities to the edge across the archipelago.
The situation mirrors a global crisis. Reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor but support an estimated 25% of all marine species. When they collapse, entire coastal food systems go with them — along with the cultural and economic lives of communities that depend on them.
On the Big Island’s Kona coast, those communities have watched the decline up close for generations.
Science and culture as one force
The program takes its name, Ākoʻakoʻa, from a Hawaiian word that means both “coral” and “to assemble.” That double meaning is intentional. The initiative is designed to work on two tracks at once: rigorous field science and the living knowledge of Native Hawaiian practitioners.
Arizona State University is leading the effort. Greg Asner, director of ASU’s Center for Global Discovery and Conservation Science, will spearhead the program. Asner helped found the Pacific Ridge to Reef Program in 1998 C.E., which used satellite, airborne, and field technologies to diagnose land and reef problems across the Pacific.
“The new program further expands this diagnostic work,” Asner said, “but it focuses far more effort on interventions that support Hawaii’s communities, both coral and human, as one force.”
Cindi Punihaole, a Native Hawaiian from Kona who runs the Kohala Center — a community-based nonprofit focused on research, education, and stewardship — described the older framework her elders passed down. “The land partner is to protect its ocean partner,” she said. “We are taught to ‘Mālama I Ka ʻĀina’ (caring for and respecting the land). When the land is healthy and clean water flows to the shores, then our corals and fish will flourish.”
That ethic treats healthy land as a precondition for healthy reefs — an insight that aligns closely with what modern ecology now confirms about land-based runoff and sediment loading on coastal ecosystems.
What the $25 million will build
The funding pool draws from multiple sources: ASU, NOAA, Hawaiʻi state’s Division of Aquatic Resources, and a donation from the Dorrance family and Dorrance Family Foundation.
The centerpiece of the physical infrastructure will be a new research and coral propagation facility in Kailua-Kona. The facility will let scientists cultivate corals at scale and test which strains show the most resilience to warmer, more acidic water — knowledge that restoration teams can then apply directly in the field.
ASU President Michael Crow framed the broader logic plainly: “What happens on land affects the health of our oceans, so threats to our coral reefs stand to impact everyone. This collaboration represents the vast potential to accelerate positive change by joining scientific knowledge and cultural wisdom to address a critically important challenge facing our world.”
A model worth watching — with real limits ahead
The Ākoʻakoʻa program is notable for the seriousness with which it treats Indigenous stewardship — not as an add-on to scientific work, but as a co-equal framework. That integration is still rare in large-scale marine restoration projects, and the approach could offer a model for reef programs elsewhere in the Pacific and beyond.
Still, 120 miles of reef is an enormous target, and the larger forces driving coral decline — rising sea temperatures, ocean acidification, and nutrient runoff — will not be solved at the local level alone. The program’s long-term success will depend not just on cultivation and community engagement, but on whether global emissions trajectories change enough to give restored reefs a fighting chance.
What Ākoʻakoʻa offers, at minimum, is a coalition worth assembling: state resource managers, federal agencies, a major research university, Native practitioners, and local nonprofits working from the same set of values. In reef restoration, that kind of alignment is itself a rare thing.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Mongabay — Science and culture join forces to restore 120 miles of Hawaiian reefs
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights recognition reaches 160 million hectares at COP30
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- The Good News for Humankind archive on marine conservation
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