Over one-third of coral restoration projects globally are ineffective. Most operate over only several hundred to a few thousand square meters. Between 2009 and 2018, reef loss totaled nearly 12,000 square kilometers. The scale mismatch is four orders of magnitude.
The strongest predictor of where coral restoration occurs is not ecological need, not coral diversity, not reef degradation severity — it is accessibility. Proximity to infrastructure, ports, and funding sources determines which reefs get restored. The field restores convenient reefs, not important ones.
The measurement problem compounds the selection problem. Most restoration programs monitor static variables — coral cover, colony survival, outplant growth rates. They ignore ecosystem functioning metrics: fish recruitment, carbonate budgets, trophic structure, water quality changes. A restored reef with 40% coral cover and no fish recruitment is not a functioning reef. It is a garden.
The critique is structural, not just quantitative. More funding would increase the scale but not change the bias. Restoration would still favor accessible sites and measure easy metrics. The field needs reorientation: site selection based on ecological connectivity and degradation severity, success metrics based on ecosystem function, and honest acknowledgment that restoration cannot keep pace with loss.
Measuring what is easy to measure instead of what matters is the defining failure mode of conservation at scale. The reef is restored when the monitoring protocol says it is. What the monitoring protocol measures determines what “restored” means. When the protocol measures only coral cover, a reef can be declared restored while functionally dead.