The Coral Cay Conservation Story

1986

A Beginning in Belize

In 1986, in Belize, Peter Raines founded Coral Cay Conservation out of a simple, urgent concern: the reefs around him were degrading, and almost no one had the resources to properly survey them, let alone protect them. Professional marine science was expensive and slow, and there were nowhere near enough trained divers and scientists to cover the world's reefs at the scale the crisis demanded.

Raines's answer became CCC's founding idea, the one that would define it for the next three and a half decades: train ordinary people, volunteers with no prior diving or science background, to become the surveying workforce themselves. It sounds simple now. In 1986, it was close to unheard of.

1986 to 2022

A Pioneer of Citizen Science

What CCC built was not a shortcut. Every volunteer who joined an expedition went through a genuine Skills Development Programme before they were let anywhere near a survey line, learning to dive to a proficient standard, then learning to identify hundreds of species of coral, fish and invertebrates, then learning the standardised survey methods that made their data usable by scientists and governments, not just a personal souvenir of the trip.

The results mattered. They were published in peer-reviewed journals, cited in real management plans, and used to help establish genuine Marine Protected Areas. CCC's own science staff worked alongside university researchers throughout, and the underlying approach, using trained volunteers to collect professional-grade ecological data at a scale no small paid team could match, was validated in published academic studies comparing volunteer-collected data against that of trained professionals.

This model, citizen science before the term was common currency, is arguably CCC's single most important legacy. It proved that reef conservation didn't have to wait for enough PhDs. It could be done, well, by ordinary people willing to learn. Over the decades, thousands of volunteers came through that programme. Many went on to build careers in marine science and conservation themselves, carrying what they'd learned at CCC into work of their own long after their expedition ended.

Worldwide

Around the World: Where CCC Worked

From that first project in Belize, CCC's reach grew steadily over the following decades, and it was never work CCC simply turned up and did. Every project began with an invitation, a host government or community asking for help gathering the data they needed to protect their own waters and forests. Over 36 years, that took CCC's teams to at least thirteen countries.

"Why volunteer with Coral Cay Conservation," from the recruitment drive of CCC's years of expansion.

The Caribbean, where it started

In Belize, CCC's volunteer divers, over 900 of them in the early years alone, surveyed the reef system that would later be recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In Honduras, a habitat mapping project on Utila in 1999 and 2000, followed by years of reef surveys around Roatan, helped build one of the first detailed pictures of the Bay Islands' reefs. In Montserrat, a volcanic island in the Lesser Antilles, CCC ran both a marine and a terrestrial rainforest project in the Centre Hills, one of its longest-running sites outside the Philippines, continuing until 2017. Tobago and Mexico were also part of CCC's Caribbean and Atlantic work over the years.

Southeast Asia and the Pacific

In Cambodia, a two-year survey programme around Koh Rong and Koh Rong Samloem, run at the invitation of the country's own Fisheries Administration, fed directly into the creation of Cambodia's first large-scale Marine Protected Area, work later carried forward into what is now the country's first national marine park. In Fiji, CCC teams ran multi-year reef monitoring around the Mamanuca Islands. In Malaysia, survey work covered the reefs of the Perhentian Islands. Indonesia and Thailand were also part of CCC's Indo-Pacific programme, and in Papua New Guinea, in a rare terrestrial project for CCC's largely marine portfolio, teams surveyed rainforest birdlife.

The Red Sea

In Egypt, CCC ran projects along the Sinai coast near Sharm el-Sheikh. In later years, that site was also used for a programme training UK military veterans in reef survey skills, run through the charity Deptherapy, as part of their rehabilitation.

The Philippines, CCC's longest chapter

CCC's work in the Philippines ran on two fronts. On Negros Island itself, the Negros Rainforest Conservation Project, run with the Negros Forests and Ecological Foundation, surveyed some of the country's most endangered endemic wildlife, among them the Visayan warty pig, the Visayan spotted deer, and two threatened hornbill species. And on the coast of Southern Leyte, a marine project that began in 2002 and moved to its final home in Napantao in 2008 grew, over two decades, into CCC's most significant conservation achievement: helping local communities establish around ten community-managed Marine Protected Areas across Sogod Bay. By the end, this was the project CCC was known for, and eventually, the only one left.

The house reef at Napantao, CCC's field base in Southern Leyte from 2008 until the project's final season.

2011 to 2019

Contraction

In 2011, Coral Cay Conservation became part of the Lifesigns Group, gaining new expertise in expedition safety and risk management alongside its existing conservation work. Over the years that followed, CCC's global footprint gradually narrowed. Projects wound down one by one. Montserrat, one of the last sites outside the Philippines, closed in 2017. By the end of that decade, Southern Leyte, the project that had begun in 2002, was the only one still running. Thirty years after Peter Raines had first put volunteers in the water in Belize, Coral Cay Conservation's global expedition programme had become a single project, on one coastline, in the Philippines.

2020 to 2022

2020 to 2022: The Final Chapter

Then came a challenge no organisation of this kind could have planned for. COVID-19 shut down international travel almost overnight in 2020, and the volunteer-travel model that had sustained CCC's work for over three decades depended entirely on people being able to fly in and join an expedition in person. Napantao, the last project standing, closed under travel restrictions and stayed closed for well over a year, part of a wider collapse across the whole volunteer-travel sector worldwide, not something unique to CCC.

In 2022, there was a hopeful attempt to start again, an expedition to the Sinai announced for that November. But by the end of that year, Coral Cay Conservation's operations had closed for good. It was a decision made reluctantly, by people who had given a great deal to keep the project alive, not because the reefs or the mission had stopped mattering, but because, after everything, there was no path left to keep going.

Today

What Remains

None of this diminishes what was built. Across 36 years and at least thirteen countries, thousands of volunteers, scholars and staff gave their time, their training, and often a season or more of their lives to reefs and forests most of them had never heard of before they arrived. Real Marine Protected Areas exist today, in Southern Leyte and elsewhere, because of survey work CCC's teams carried out. Real careers in marine science and conservation began on a CCC expedition. That is the legacy this page exists to honour: not a company or a balance sheet that eventually failed, but the people who did the actual work, in the water and in the field, for over three and a half decades.