Reef Resilience: Building Resilience into Coral Reef Conservation

Online Reef Course

The Nature Conservancy is offering an innovative online training program on Reef Resilience to provide coral reef managers, trainers, and policymakers with guidance on building resilience to climate change into the design of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) and daily management activities. The course is available year round and is self-paced. We will be announcing university affiliation shortly.

The self-paced course is now also available in Bahasa, with a Spanish version coming in June 2013.

Program Description

This course is designed to be 12-weeks long with one module per week, but students can go as fast or slow as they like. The course incorporates the new science, lessons learned, case studies, and practices that have been included in the Coral Reefs module of the Reef Resilience toolkit, and is designed to accelerate the knowledge and facilitate access to essential information and tools needed to incorporate resilience principles into management strategies.

While the focus of this course is on the problem of coral bleaching and actions that managers can take to address this problem, specifically in the context of marine protected areas, the recommendations and tools can also be applied to most threats that coral reefs face today.

The program includes key aspects such as:

• An introduction to mass coral bleaching and the ecological and social impacts
• Description of the four main principles of resilience and how to identify factors of resilience
• Recommendations on the design and management of resilient MPAs

Beginning the Course

Here are the steps to begin the training:

1. Navigate to www.conservationtraining.org.
2. If you have not already done so, create an account on ConservationTraining.org by clicking the 'Create new account' link.
3. Once your account is created and confirmed, log into ConservationTraining.org and click 'Reef Resilience — Self-paced'.
4. Enter the course and begin by reading the course description and syllabus.
5. Complete each module at your own pace, including the self-tests.
6. When complete you will receive a professional certificate signifying successful completion of the full course.