Our marine conservation organisation

Coral Guardian has been restoring colors to oceans since 2012.

Our story

Coral Guardian is a non-governmental organisation. Since 2012, we have been working internationally and with local communities to protect coral ecosystems.

2012 Creation of Coral Guardian

After a year in Indonesia, where Martin Colognoli, a marine biologist and co-founder of the organization, was working in a business exporting corals and other marine wildlife. There, he discovers practices that are harmful to the natural environment, to animals and also to humans. Based on this first experience, we launch the first coral reef conservation project thanks to the participative program “Adopt a Coral” allowing anyone to contribute to the protection of our ocean. Coral Guardian was born.

2013 Research and Development

Based in Indonesia, during those first few years we continuously worked on improving our techniques on projects around Bali with various methods such as rope, concrete and ceramics. The use of rope, as an example, proved very complicated because of the strong ocean currents in that area. We found that the technique that proved to be the most efficient was fixing corals with stainless steel wire onto metallic frames which were easy to make.

Restauration corallienne - Coral Guardian

2015 Launch of the pilot project in Indonesia, on Hatamin island

Having gained extensive experience with the implementation of several test programs on the islands of Bali, Gili Trawangan and Nusa Penida, we then launched our first participatory marine conservation pilot project on the Hatamin archipelago in Indonesia, by directly implicating locals on the ground.

2019 Spreading our participatory model with the Blue Center

After 7 years of operation, we launched our own training program, the Blue Center, to enable smaller structures around the world to grow by benefiting from Coral Guardian’s expertise. The aim is to spread our model of participative marine conservation around the world following the great success of our conservation program developed on Hatamin island.

2020 Launch of our Mediterranean Sea project in Spain

We launched our first key Blue Center project, in collaboration with the local organization Coral Soul. This project, Deep CORE, is located in Punta de la Mona, in Spain, and one of the first participatory marine conservation programs in the Mediterranean Sea.

“My professional career began in Indonesia as a manager in an export company dealing with corals and other marine animals for the aquarium trade. I was quickly disillusioned when I realised that I was taking part in a legal plundering and poaching of marine life that I cherished so much. This experience made me realise that humans are drawing on natural resources without giving anything back. So I co-founded the nonprofit Coral Guardian at that time. The main idea was to protect coral ecosystems through working with the people who depend on them, in this case traditional fishermen fighting for their food sovereignty.”