A state goal to restore 25% of Florida's ailing reef by 2050 is in danger of stumbling after money to cover the second phase of the program was left out of the Legislature's proposed budget.
The omission has left more than a dozen rescue teams around the state scrambling for money to keep restoration on track and staff paid while supporters rally state lawmakers to reinstate funding. The program marked Florida's first long-term promise to fix the 350-mile long reef.
"It was a governor's initiative, it had funding through the legislature and their support for three years, and it was amazing," said Joanna Walczak, the former chief of the state's coastal and coral protection program and now vice president of conservation for the Loggerhead Marine Life Center in West Palm Beach. "And then we found out that the funding had vanished."
READ MORE: Florida's 350-mile long reef tract is now shrinking faster than it's growing
What happens now is unclear. Gov. Ron DeSantis' office referred questions to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. An FDEP spokeswoman said $28.5 million budgeted since the program launched in 2023 had been awarded and that more money remains. But she did not respond to follow-up questions asking how much.
With operating costs for the coming year estimated at $11.5 million, coral programs from Miami to Orlando, including the Boy Scouts of America, the Florida Aquarium and Frost Science Center along with Nova Southeastern University, University of Miami, Florida Atlantic University and Florida International University will struggle to keep breeding programs already underway up and running.
At the University of Miami Rosenstiel School, marine biologist Andrew Baker said his lab is pivoting from expanding facilities to scale up breeding efforts to re-budgeting money to keep staff.
"If those people were to be let go and the program reinstated at a later date, we would have to start again training new individuals, which would be a huge setback in terms of progress," he said.
At the Scouting America's Sea Base program on Summerland Key, where staff outplanted 4,000 corals just last week, a year without funding will require moving money from other work to maintain the coral restoration program, said director Abigail Clark.
"Not receiving FCR3 funds next year will limit our capacity to continue contributing towards the collective restoration of Florida's Coral Reef," she said in an email. "Without ongoing FCR3 [Florida Coral Reef Program] support, it will be difficult to maintain the Sea Base Coral Restoration Program without diverting resources from other programmatic priorities."
The loss of funding couldn't come at a worse time, Walczak said, when the groups intended to begin implementing the widescale rescue effort that scientists say is the best option, for now, to maintain reefs.
"Just recently, actually over this weekend, the Florida Aquarium had 9,000 coral babies that were distributed to the partners as part of this pipeline. And those babies made it into the water already," Walczak said. "So we're just starting to see this perfect alignment of all of these pieces coming together."
DeSantis launched the plan in January 2023 with an executive order calling for a reef rescue plan that dramatically expanded land-based coral nurseries breeding baby corals. By that point, scientists had already confirmed the reef was no longer sustaining itself and instead shrinking. To keep it from vanishing altogether, a handful of nurseries would need to be dramatically scaled up and more opened.
Seven months later, a staggering marine heat wave slammed South Florida and left the state's elkhorn, a large branching coral that once crowned reefs with a powerful defense to storm surge, functionally extinct.
Under the plan mapped out by coral scientists, breeding efforts would fall under one program for the first time to build a coral pipeline. The pipeline could provide a lifeline until bigger problems, including disease and warming waters, can be tackled.
"We realized that the state of the ecosystem was so dire that if we didn't take these management actions now, we wouldn't even have anything left to restore in the future," said Walczak, who at the time ran the state's coral restoration program. " We broke down silos. We got researchers sharing their information before they even published it. We got people to really kind of drop the logos and really work together collaboratively in a way that I hadn't seen before."
With about $28.5 million in grants, 15 universities and nonprofits set up coral breeding and outplanting programs, refining the types and genomes of the most suitable coral to begin building or expanding breeding facilities. They also conducted a reef-wide survey to determine the best locations for planting coral. Locations needed to first provide coral with the best chance to reproduce to help seed the reef. Secondly, they looked for places with the best potential for providing services that help the reef tract generate an estimated $8.5 billion in benefits: shoreline protection, fishing grounds and places that draw tourists. That alone took several years.
"This really galvanized our community in thinking strategically about what it would take to make it come back," Walczak said.
But they also recognized that the program needed to be an industry with wider benefits for the state.
"It isn't just about the science of it, it's about building the workforce. It's about building the infrastructure that will allow for it and creating that new economy related to this," she said.
The coral also ensured that work around ports, which often damage or kill coral, could continue with a steady supply of new coral needed for required mitigation work.
' Broward County, Miami-Dade County, having two massively big, incredibly influential ports in the area right next to a very vulnerable coral reef that is at a tipping point means that both those counties and the state need to take a serious look at long-term investment in coral restoration," Walczak said. "This is just gonna have to be part of their portfolio moving forward."
To get the program up and running, lawmakers budgeted $28.5 million for the first phase between 2023 and 2026. Funding would jump to $25 million year as implementation began in 2027 and work pivoted to operations: what corals to plant where, how many, monitoring and the logistics of maintaining such a large-scale breeding program to reach the 25% restoration goal by 2035. Once implemented, costs would drop back to $9.5 million a year, although as the number of partners increased, annual costs could run higher. By Everglades standards, reef restoration would come at a fraction of the cost.
In Tallahassee, the House has proposed a $113.6 billion package, about $1 billion less than the current budget that ends June 30. The Senate plan is 115 billion. Legislators did not reach an agreement before the 60-day session ended on Friday.
With next year's proposed budget likely to be debated at a special session, Walczak said organizers would be happy to get just $9.5 million to keep operations going. In the meantime, even as universities and nonprofits look for contingency plans, reef advocates worry any delay in building out the program could be costly.
"The state made an admirable and ambitious commitment to restoring Florida's coral reef over the next decade and multi year projects were being set up that now need to be pulled back because of this lack of funding," said Miami Waterkeeper executive director Rachel Silverstein. "It's going to be very hard to restart the engine because these programs are now unfunded and reef needs are getting more and more dire and critical every year."
For Walczak, who spent nearly 20 years at FDEP watching coral reefs on a downward spiral, from a 1998 bleaching to a 2010 freeze, followed by an outbreak of stony coral in 2014 and widespread coral loss during the PortMiami dredge, then more bleaching and the 2023 heat wave, this program offered a glimmer of hope.
"I was the main manager in charge at that point and it was a hard place to be," she said, recalling the 2014 outbreak of the lethal stony coral disease. "There weren't a lot of people paying attention, even though we were trying to raise the alarm on it."
In the last few years, with the promises made by DeSantis, she said coral scientists were beginning to feel more optimistic.
"If we can get this right here in Florida, we can get this right anywhere. This is a really complex, tough place to have a coral reef, but we can do this," she said. "This is our moonshot. We just need to commit the resources to it."
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