Where the money goes, item by item.
A budget for physical work on one reef, plus the cost of proving what it did. That is the whole of it.
The budget
Five things a reef program spends on.
Proportions shift with the reef, its thermal season and its distance from a working port. The categories hold.
- Vessel time, weighted toward the heat The largest line by some distance. A hull, its fuel, its crew and its treatment stage, working the program's reef all year and hardest through the peak thermal weeks, when water and weather are worst. This line settles how much reef is covered: one hull holds what one hull can work, and a program funded for several holds a considerable stretch of a park. A peak-weeks-only program would cost less and be worth less, the reef arriving carrying everything the rest of the year put on it.
- Oxygen, and getting it there Oxygen is the consumable this work runs on, and the morning profile sets the day's need. Procurement and logistics to somewhere with one supply run a month are a real cost, included in the figure a sponsor is quoted at the start.
- Instruments in the water Loggers and profiles reading temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH and turbidity through depth, in place before the first pass and left running. This equipment turns an intervention into evidence.
- Survey work by somebody independent Benthic survey of the treated area and an untreated comparison area, before and after, by a party independent of the operator with no stake in a good number. Structurally the most important line, rarely the biggest.
- Publication and the sponsor statement Compiling the record, publishing it in full, and drafting the exact claim it supports. Small, and it makes the other four defensible.
Marketing production, ambassadors and adoption certificates sit outside the program. Commission a film separately, so the reef money stays reef money.
What a program period owes, separately from the budget
No program period is open yet. When one opens, it names what a sponsor of a unit in it is owed: the same list for every unit in that period, fixed before the first unit is offered, and attached to the unit itself, whoever the sponsor and whatever the amount.
It is a floor. It states the minimum owed, and nothing above it is owed until written in. It can be added to, and an addition binds everyone in that period, including sponsors who settled before it was entered. It cannot be cut. A partner's offer on top of it stays withdrawable until written into the floor, and standing on a square buys none of it.
Pricing
Pricing follows the site read.
Reef intervention costs vary more than almost any other category of environmental work.
Three orders of magnitude is not a rounding error
Those figures cover restoration of every kind (nursery gardening, substrate building, transplanting), and no in-water treatment program sits among them. Three orders of magnitude separate the cheapest and dearest technique, so a per-hectare rate quoted before a site visit is arithmetic nobody has done.
A price on a Reef Hero program comes after an operator has read the site: its depth, access, distance from a port, the stressor it suffers from, and the length of its heat window.
The source
Bayraktarov and colleagues, Ecological Applications, 2016, synthesized 235 studies and 954 observations across coral, seagrass, mangrove, saltmarsh and oyster restoration. The three figures are its coral reef subset.
Where the measurements fall
The work does not wait for a season, and the measurement is timed against one.
Thermal stress arrives at different times on different coastlines, so measurement stages are set against a reef's own thermal peak, on a program already running. The work itself does not start and stop with it.
| Stage | When | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Site read | Before anything is funded | An operator assesses the reef, the stressor and the access, and says whether in-water treatment is the right instrument |
| Method and baseline | Before the first pass | Measurement plan published, instruments deployed, benthic survey of treated and comparison areas by an independent party |
| Standing work | From then on, without a break | Cooling, shading, oxygenation and clarity worked toward the agreed outcome week by week, whatever the sea temperature. Under live heat stress the clarity duty stands down and the bubble cloud over the marked patch keeps turning part of the day's light back for as long as the exposure lasts |
| Watch | As sea temperature climbs | Degree heating weeks tracked against NOAA Coral Reef Watch thresholds. The vessel is already on that water |
| Peak weeks | Through the maximum | Oxygen and shade over the same perimeter, run hard, with readings taken pass by pass |
| Post-peak survey | Weeks after the peak | The same survey, by the same independent party, over the same transects. Recovery is a slow signal |
| Publication | After the survey | The complete record goes out, flat results included, and the sponsor receives the statement of what it supports |
Independent oversight
Somebody independent stands over the measurement.
A sponsor statement carries the weight of whoever took the reading underneath it. On a Reef Hero program that is a local scientific institution, engaged before the baseline and still reading the feed long after your funded stretch has closed.
Alarivean builds that oversight into every program it runs: the marine institute, the park authority's science team, the university that has surveyed that coast for twenty years. Each is already accountable for that reef and staying put.
They receive the telemetry the crew steers on, as it arrives, can put their own instruments in beside ours, and keep their own copy of all of it. The benthic survey your statement rests on is theirs.
When somebody in an unfriendly room asks who measured it, the answer is a named institution and a published record, neither of them the operator.
The test is narrow and it is the same test wherever a reading has to hold up: does the fee of the party taking it move with what it says? Here it does not. The institution is paid for the survey and the oversight whichever direction the transects come back, which is why its numbers can be handed to a park authority, a permit officer or a party pricing what a bad thermal season costs that coast, and read the same way by all three.
The sentence you get to print
Supportable and unsupportable, side by side.
No program exists yet, so neither example describes a real one.
Inside the record
A named share of in-water treatment inside a defined program zone, over a stated period of a year-round program, with independent survey on fixed transects at the start and end of that period, and the measured change in a published record anyone can open.
Specific, bounded, attributed and checkable.
Outside the record
That you are protecting the reef. That your program is saving coral reefs. That you have offset a footprint by restoring marine habitat. That the reef is now resilient to climate change.
Each claims something outside the perimeter, the period or the measurement, and gets quoted back at you.
A sponsor writes their own copy. The drafted sentence matches the published record that sits in public beside it.
Asked by boards and marketing directors
Five answers
How much does a reef sponsorship cost?
There is no rate card, and a figure quoted before somebody has read the site would be invented.
Published reviews of coral restoration report a median near US$400,000 per hectare at 2010 prices, ranging from roughly US$6,000 for a nursery phase to US$4,000,000 for building artificial substrate, with real costs judged two to four times above reported medians.
What if the reef bleaches anyway?
Then the record says it bleached, the readings show how far and for how long, and your statement says so.
A program is judged on whether the work was done properly and measured by the independent party. Nobody controls a marine heatwave, so the contract promises no outcome against one.
Can we bring our own marine biologist?
Yes, and please do. The baseline is the visit that matters. Everything measured afterward is read against what your scientist saw on day one.
Do we get exclusivity over the reef?
No. Reefs sit in territorial waters, generally under a marine authority, often inside a protected area with its own management plan.
Each unit covers a stated period of a defined program and is funded whole. Other sponsors take other units on the same reef in the same period; no unit is split between two sponsors, and none carries a right over the reef or a veto on who else helps.
How long does a sponsorship run?
The program on the reef is a continuous subscription bought from the operator, running between thermal seasons too.
A sponsor chooses which squares in the zone, and whether the support is general or attached to one program over them; timing is not a choice. Consecutive periods give a run of comparable measurements, worth much more than a single pass.
Your unit is bought at a fixed posted price and waits only on the rest of the period filling up. The program starts when the period has the support it needs, on terms set by the operator, the client and the authority over that water.
Aquatic Prosperity as a Service
Start with the reef you already worry about.
Name it, what happens to it and in which months, and what a bad season costs the business. The operator will say what a bounded program there would consist of.