As communities across the Hawaiian islands continue to recover from the effects of recent storms and hurricanes, marine environments beneath the surface have felt the impact as well.
HPR spoke with Julia Rose, coral restoration program manager at The Nature Conservancy, who has been out on the field surveying the storm damage sustained by Hawaiʻi's reefs.
Hawaiʻi is the first state in the country to insure its reefs, and the recent storms triggered not one but two payouts from the policy.
Rose joined The Conversation to share what her teams are reporting from the field.
Interview Highlights
On the storm damage to Hawaiʻi’s reefs
JULIA ROSE: We're seeing large coral colonies, massive size-of-a-car coral colonies, that have broken off and rolled all over the place and ultimately sort of pulverized the reef around them. So what we're seeing is massive areas of reef that have been turned into rubble. We're also seeing many broken coral colonies that are still surviving, that likely only have a short window of time to survive without being stably attached to the substrate. So that's what our team has been out there this week on Hawaiʻi Island, working to address damage still from Hurricane Lala taking these coral colonies and reattaching them to the reef with cement.
On the insurance policy and their restoration efforts
ROSE: There is, honestly, so much reef damage that just the capacity of responding organizations, we know we're never going to address it all. I don't want to create the impression that, because this insurance policy is in place, we're going to go out and fix all of the reefs everywhere and we'll be fine. That is not the case at all. We are going to be able to address a small fraction of the damage that happened. And so we feel our energy is best placed where we can have the most impact. You're right in saying that lifting up massive, several meter large colonies and reattaching them is really hard to do, and because it's so hard to do, because it would take so much time and resources and technical experience, a lot of what we're focusing on are the corals that are still large enough to be reproductive, but small enough where we can actually feasibly handle them.
On the longevity of Hawaiʻi's coral reefs
ROSE: These ecosystems have been subjected to these kinds of storms intermittently for hundreds, thousands of years. It's not that the storms are coming and destroying everything. It's everything else that these ecosystems are subject to in this day and age, with warming oceans and pollution and overuse and so many stressors just piling on top of each other, that when a large impact like this happens, their ability to recover on their own is so diminished, and that's where we come in. …
These reefs are a part of who we are as a community and as a culture. And I'm thrilled that we're able to do something about it. … And I constantly want to be able to do more, because these reefs deserve a second chance.
This story aired on The Conversation on Sept. 21, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
