Coral Reefs - Earth Law Center (ELC)

• Between 2018-2020, HCF worked with the Earth Law Center to develop a toolkit for coral reef managers. Unlike conventional reef management practices, this toolkit is innovative in that it emphasizes the inherent value of the reef, and offers market-based solutions to managing reef health.
  
  
• The toolkit has been presented to the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force, and has been adopted by the Ministry of Natural Resources, Environment, and Tourism in the Republic of Palau.

• The finalized toolkit, A Voice for Coral Reef Ecosystems Through the Rights of Nature and Ecocentric Law, includes model legislation, global case studies, and legal strategies to recognize coral reefs as rights-bearing entities. It was featured at the UN Ocean Conference in 2025 and supports implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Despite global conservation and restoration efforts, coral reefs continue to die at an alarming rate. Traditional approaches such as Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are essential, but not sufficient to fully curb reef destruction. Market-based solutions such as replanting corals may provide a pathway to success; however, there is no clear funding stream and enabling policies are few and far between.

Earth Law Center (ELC) has a unique, nature-centric framework that would benefit coral reefs. Between 2018 and 2020, Howell Conservation Fund helped catalyze a team at ELC to investigate how the framework could be practically applied in the U.S. and abroad. 

ELC and HCF’s joint work drew on the lessons learned from HCF Founder Brett Howell’s work on market-based coral reef restoration. Brett is one of the early innovators behind the idea of applying market-based conservation approaches to restore coral reefs. His prior work in this field has included projects for the Georgia Aquarium, the Property & Environment Research Center (PERC), and OneReef. 

This project was unique in that it regarded coral reefs as living entities with their own inherent rights. It used the premise of Earth Law to provide a means to protect reefs for the benefit of the whole ecosystem, including humans.