Episode
Show Me the Receipts: Why I.CARE Monitors Every Coral It Plants
- Podcast
- How To Protect The Ocean
- Published
- Sep 3, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1036
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://www.speakupforblue.com/podcast
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Summary
Most coral restoration groups check on a sample of what they've planted, often around 20 to 30 percent, and report that sample as if it represents everything in the water. I.CARE checks on all of it. Every single coral outplant gets monitored at one week, one month, 90 days, then one, two, and three years, with no substitute and nothing left unaccounted for. That rule was built in by co-founders Mike Goldberg and Dr. Kylie Smith before I.CARE ever planted its first coral, and Mike frames it as a matter of fiduciary duty, the same obligation he'd expect from anyone handling someone else's money, whether that's a $2 add-on on a Key Dives trip or a large donation. The number that discipline actually produces is a 47 percent one-year survival rate, tracked across all 17 coral species I.CARE works with. Mike considers it strong, and few practitioners in the field can even produce a comparable number, since it depends on tracking everything rather than a flattering sample. I.CARE didn't pause that reporting during the 2023 global bleaching event either; it kept publishing survival numbers straight through it. That matters because coral restoration, as a field, mostly doesn't do this. A 2020 peer-reviewed systematic review in PLOS ONE found that roughly 60 percent of restoration projects worldwide were monitored for less than 18 months, and that 45 percent of projects didn't even measure the ecological goals they'd originally set out to hit. A second peer-reviewed paper, published in Conservation Letters in September 2025, goes further, arguing that funding for marine restoration is currently outpacing the underlying science and framing under-monitored projects as a real greenwashing risk to the field. None of this is about naming or shaming any specific organization; both pa…