The Reefs
Tokens are supplied by Wakatobi Dive Resort, which has been sustaining an environmental preservation service for a quarter of a century.
About Wakatobi
At the heart of the Coral Triangle, in Southeast Sulawesi, Indonesia, something unique is happening.
Thanks to sound economics, local communities are able to interact synergistically with their marine backyard.
What’s a reef worth?
In practice, an intact ecosystem is only worth more than a degraded ecosystem if there is a mechanism in place to realise value.
A fisherman can extract some small value from a reef by fishing. This fisherman will only be incentivised to protect the reef’s biodiversity instead of extracting it if protection is associated with greater income.
Dive tourism can do just this. A pristine reef, full of life, is worth something to a visiting diver. And so, divers’ joy can be a more lucrative, sustainable harvest than fish.
golden reefs
Wakatobi’s operation shifts employment from unsustainable fishing practices to meaningful service sector jobs, fuelling richer reefs and drawing in visitors.
Over time, local communities realised that service revenues increased their reef-linked income by several orders of magnitude compared to fishing.
They have since been safeguarding their valuable underwater resource.
So the future of Wakatobi’s pristine reefs is secure, because they are a precious income-generating resource.
UNLOCKING ADDITIONAL VALUE
Reefonomics saw that these reefs could also deliver a service to companies, and in doing so reliably increase income flowing from reefs to local communities.
And thus, Wakatobi became a reef token supplier. Token supply works synergistically with dive tourism, acting as additional layer of value creation.
This vastly expands the marine area that can be protected.
MORE REEFS
At Wakatobi, reef token supply works alongside dive tourism to drive reef protection.
Elsewhere, token supply will operate as a stand-alone system, creating employment opportunities and increasing the value of intact reefs to local communities sufficiently to incentivise reef protection.
get in touch
Interested in associating with scalable, verified outcomes for marine biodiveristy?