The most important challenge or potential road block to future progress of coral farming and reef rehabilitation overall is largely related to climate change associated conditions, in combination with poor land use management and weak governance. Therefore, human activities must be integrated into the equation for coral farming and reef rehabilitation success. This suggests that positioning of coral farms is fundamental. Special considerations should be given to factors such as: 1) environmental history of each proposed coral farming site; 2) environmental conditions of adjacent reef communities; 3) sediment movement ; 4) distance of sources of runoff; 5)exposure to wave action, winter storm and hurricane swells; 6) distance to large sand deposits ; and 7) magnitude and extent of recreational activities impacting the system, even with so called “low-impact” activities. Therefore, carrying capacity and the limit of acceptable change need to be determined for such sites.
Successful coral farming and reef rehabilitation will also require functional synchronized and integrated management efforts to address land use patterns, water quality issues and fishing activities in order to improve ecosystem conditions for enhancing coral and fish recruitment, dutch bucket hydroponic and overall biodiversity recovery . It will be critical to fully implement LBSP controls, as well as appropriate watershed-scale management plans to control runoff impacts. Runoff-associated bleaching events and colony mortality can be highly clone-specific, as well as site-specific and event-specific. No generalizations can be made because not all coral clones respond the same, or because impacts from any given extreme rainfall event can produce different impacts on different locations, and on different times of the year. The combination of high SST and factors such as meso-scale water quality can also have significant impacts on project outcomes and should be closely monitored. Achieving successful local management of reefs is vital to maintain the sustained net production of coral farms, and of reef structure, and therefore the provision of the important ecosystem services that they provide.
These measures are also vital for buying time for reefs while global action on climate change is implemented . Any problem or imbalance in any of these elements will have in the long run a negative impact on rehabilitation success. If such impacts occur in combination with increasing forecasted climate change-related negative impacts in the near future and increased reef degradation rates, they could make community-based coral reef rehabilitation more challenging. In combination with declining reef condition and increased inability of coral and fish larvae to identify suitable natural reef bottoms for settlement , dutch buckets system it could potentially drive rapidly declining, transient coral reefs into the slippery slope to slime . It provided a framework to analyze ecosystem changes in terms of impacts on human well-being. Degradations in the environment are now seen as the increasing ecological costs of achieving this well-being. This increases the legitimacy of conservation and restoration policies, as this new reference framework offers a positive and ethno-centered approach to environmental protection. It entails a win-win relationship where services appear as common goods or as “the dividends that society receives from natural capital ”.
This change in the frame of reference requires a reassessment of actors’ perceptions of these services in order to adapt public policies and promote collective learning processes towards their protection and/or their development. At an individual level, perceptions are determining factors to understand behavior evolution in the face of new standards for ecosystem preservation . At a collective level, they condition adhesion and trust in the institutional systems responsible for the implementation of these measures.The ecosystem service approach involves several stages: the identification , the monetization, the privatization, and the marketing of services , partially adopted by the Ring et al. . Identification is a key stage which conditions the recognition of the value given to these services and the acceptation of policies. Yet, when compared to the other aspects, it is seldom the subject of research.