Indonesia — art-led conservation site selection

The goal. Coral reefs are being lost faster than conservation can replace them, and almost everything tried so far ends when the funding does. This is an attempt at the alternative: a reef economy that pays for itself and reverses coral decline at the same time — not another project sunk into a place, but something a community owns, earns from, and keeps. Art is the catalyst, not the product.

Indonesia already has underwater art — Nest at Gili Meno, the Badung Cultural Park at Nusa Dua, Living Sea at Amed, the sculptures at Pemuteran — and every one of them is an amenity: placed for divers, funded by a resort or a grant, producing photographs and dive fees. None of them changed how a community earns, fishes, farms or governs its reef. That is the unoccupied ground. Here the artwork exists to start something: it mobilizes people, draws an audience, and creates something worth paying for; tourism, fisheries practice and land-side work are integrated so the whole package supports itself. If it works it is replicable — which is the point, because one restored reef is a demonstration, and a model that funds itself is a strategy. The test, five years on, stays simple: is money still moving, and is there more coral?

The approach. Regions across Indonesia were drawn from national and global datasets and assessed on evidence from several independent sources: 85,228 Indonesian rows in the Reef Check archive (888,680 worldwide), MERMAID management and compliance records, 149 Indonesian locations in Anderson’s interventions map (228 papers), the Indonesian restoration and legal literature (Razak et al. 2022, 2024; 533 national restoration records), Anderson’s Global Coralition site scoring, and — where they exist — his own 143 dive-site pins and CV-derived cover.

Where they are

Marker color uses the same absolute 1–5 scale as the table, so a marker means what a cell means; marker size stretches across the observed range (2.50–3.81) so the ranking stays legible. Solid = top three. Click any marker for its score.

Candidates were then filtered on reef condition and trend, thermal exposure, stressor load, partner presence, permitting tier, art precedent and whether a revenue mechanism could plausibly exist — Halmahera on nickel-mining runoff and partnership risk; Komodo because its cover is RISING (26.9% in 2014 to 38.9% in 2020) so it needs no rescue; Alor on thin infrastructure; others on absent partners, absent visitors or data too thin to judge. Three survived to full scoring on 15 weighted dimensions: Banda, the Gili Islands and Nusa Penida / Lembongan.

Who won: Banda, narrowly — and the top two are effectively tied. At the default weights Banda scores 3.81, Nusa Penida / Lembongan 3.68 and the Gili Islands 3.45. The gap between first and second is 0.13, well inside the noise of any weighting choice. Each leads on something different.

• Banda has what is hardest to manufacture: the best reef in the set (46–58% and rising), an embedded science-led partner, a community small enough to mobilize fully, no project saturation, and the furthest reach per dollar — but it cannot fund itself on visitors alone.
• Nusa Penida / Lembongan has an existing art economy, Indonesia’s largest visitor flux, local capacity and the fastest route to revenue — on a reef that has measurably declined (40.0 → 29.3% cover).
• The Gili Islands have a dive levy already being collected and 25 years of independent monitoring that covers the Biorock structures themselves, which makes a controlled test of those structures available immediately — but heat exposure (DHW 8.7) no better than the other two, and — decisively — a community that the published record says has already been fragmented by exactly this kind of development: Hampton & Jeyacheya (2015) document four army-led land clearances on Gili Trawangan and report that awig-awig, the customary rule protecting the reefs, is no longer effective. The Gilis fell from second to third when the thermal figure was corrected — see the Thermal exposure row.

Drag the weights and the order changes, which is the honest result: optimize for a project that pays for itself soonest and Lembongan rises; optimize for community uptake and defensible ecological evidence and Banda leads.

The recommendation is two sites, not one. Lembongan and Banda have opposite weaknesses, and running both cancels them. Lembongan on its own would only prove that a project can earn money somewhere already full of tourists. Banda on its own risks becoming a reef that needs donors indefinitely. Run together, Lembongan earns the revenue and Banda delivers the ecological result, both measured to the same standard — and the second site costs far less than the first, because the method, the staff and the reporting are shared. It also means there is something to show every year: money from the Bali side in years 1–2, reef outcomes from Banda in years 1–3. The Gilis are the strongest fallback if either site proves unworkable, and the natural third if the program grows.

The lesson that shaped the scoring. Indonesia's ICRG program spent USD 7.9 m sinking ~96,000 structures in Bali with zero budget for monitoring, no revenue attached, and no documented reef outcome. It got the hard part right — permission, money, labour — and the durable part wrong. So a site scores well here only if it supplies the durable part: a named owner, a revenue mechanism and a measured baseline, before anything is deployed.