Coral Gardeners’ Thailand mission gains momentum with Rolex and Sylvia Earle

As part of an exclusive group of media and content creators, Tatler was invited by Rolex to witness this restoration work first-hand. The visit brought together two generations of ocean advocates: Bernicot, a Rolex Testimonee since 2022, and the legendary marine biologist and explorer Sylvia Earle, a Rolex Testimonee since 1982. Both are partners of Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative, launched in 2019 to support explorers, scientists and organisations working to safeguard the natural world.

The expedition in Thailand offered a rare opportunity for Bernicot and Earle to explore the reefs around Koh Mak and Koh Kood together, exchange perspectives and draw greater attention to the urgent need for ocean conservation. Over several days of dives and discussions, we tagged along as they surveyed local reefs and shared insights with the group about the growing pressures facing coral ecosystems.

Through Mission Blue, the global ocean conservation initiative she founded in 2009, Earle has spent decades advocating for the protection of ecologically vital marine areas she coined Hope Spots—places considered critical to ocean health and biodiversity, or essential to the communities that depend on them. After seeing the wealth of marine life surrounding Koh Mak and Koh Kood, Coral Gardeners has begun exploring the possibility of nominating the area as a Hope Spot—raising the profile of its reefs and strengthening efforts to safeguard them. Combined with Coral Gardeners’ restoration work, such recognition could help return these reefs to the vibrant ecosystems they once were.

During a roundtable aboard a boat before one of the dives, Earle spoke alongside Bernicot about the role individuals play in conservation. “No one person can do everything, but every person can do something,” she said. For her, the future of ocean conservation lies not only in technology, but also in empowering communities. She has long advocated the need to “stop the killing and start the caring”, a philosophy that resonates strongly with Coral Gardeners’ mission.

In many ways, the gathering brought together two complementary visions. Through Mission Blue, Earle identifies and champions marine ecosystems that are critical to the planet’s health. Bernicot and Coral Gardeners, meanwhile, focus on hands-on restoration—cultivating and replanting corals to help damaged reefs recover. This synergy fostered through Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative allows these two approaches—protection and restoration—to work in tandem. As Bernicot highlighted, corals cannot flourish in isolation. “Restoration without protection is useless,” he said. “You need the surrounding species, the fish, the turtles. You need a living ecosystem for the corals to be happy and thrive.”

Protect and Restore

Thailand’s waters host a far greater diversity of coral species than those of French Polynesia, where Coral Gardeners first began its restoration work. To accommodate this variety, the Thai outpost introduced the organisation’s first land-based nursery—billed as the largest of its kind in Southeast Asia and supported by the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative. Located just inland from the shore on Koh Mak, the nursery is capable of housing up to 40 tanks and cultivating as many as 50,000 corals at a time. During the trip, we visited the nursery and saw how fragments collected from resilient coral colonies are carefully propagated before being transplanted back onto degraded reefs.

Complementing the land-based facility are underwater ocean nurseries spread across restoration sites around Koh Mak and Koh Kood, along with dedicated research and development areas. Together, they enable the team to grow more than 10,000 corals each year. The programme has already produced its first generation of mature corals, now ready to be outplanted onto nearby reefs.

To accelerate the process, the team employs the “cookie method”. This innovative coral restoration technique involves breaking coral into small pieces (a process known as micro-fragmentation), attaching them to cement discs and then placing them in nurseries to grow before being transplanted back onto reefs. In the wild, many massive coral species grow at a glacial pace, sometimes expanding only a few centimetres a year. By fragmenting them into smaller sections, the corals can grow and fuse more rapidly, covering the discs within months and forming the foundation for new reef structures.

The work, though, extends far beyond the nursery tanks. Through CG Labs, Coral Gardeners’ in-house research and development arm, the team has turned the surrounding reefs into a living laboratory. Using ReefOS, a suite of digital monitoring tools, researchers can track the recovery of restored sites in real time. Among these technologies are cameras known as ReefCAM, which are powered by artificial intelligence, and can identify and catalogue marine life returning to the reef.

Hydrophones placed beneath the water’s surface add another dimension to the monitoring process. Healthy coral reefs are surprisingly noisy environments and by recording these soundscapes, scientists can measure ecosystem recovery in ways that go beyond visual observation. Data collected in 2024 revealed that restored sites generated around 50 per cent more acoustic activity than degraded reefs—a sign that marine life is steadily returning.

For Bernicot, however, the work unfolding in Koh Mak and Koh Kood is only the beginning. The Thai outpost is intended as a model for future restoration hubs around the world—places where science, technology and local stewardship converge to help coral reefs recover. “Our goal is to become the most advanced coral reef restoration programme on the planet,” he said.

Ultimately, Bernicot believes that conservation hinges on human behaviour. “We don’t have a coral reef problem. We have a people problem,” he said. Adding on, Earle posited: “People are the problem, but we are also the solution. We have to give back. We have to do everything we can to protect as much of the planet as possible. You don’t have to have a PhD to be a scientist; what you need is an open mind. Ask questions and find answers. Anybody can do this and everybody should do this.”

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