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Paper short abstract

Warm-water coral reef ecosystems are currently on track to disappear within our lifetime, globally. This paper examines how coastal communities in Alor, Indonesia are balancing reef death with a new marine tourism boom, focusing on ethnographic explorations of death and futurity.

Paper long abstract

At present, 80% of coral reefs are now impacted by climate change. Without major intervention on a global scale, it is now predicted that warm-water reefs will disappear as a meaningful planetary ecosystem within a generation (Lenton et al 2025). The impact of a change of this scale for the global ocean, and for humanity, is unknown. This paper is grounded in past and future work with frontline coastal communities facing this transformation in the Alor Archipelago of Eastern Indonesia. Alor sits at the bottom of the "Coral Triangle", one of the most marine biodiverse areas of the planet, and is home to a wealth of communities traditionally tied to fishing and diving its reefs. The district has also seen a major increase in reef-dependent dive tourism in the last 5 years, attached to a great deal of hope for expanding local economic opportunities (Durney, forthcoming). At the same time, Alor's reefs are vulnerable and showing signs of stress, like everywhere else. In this paper I will explore ethnographic approaches for examining how Alorese communities are living with this seesaw of tourism boom and extreme predicted vulnerability, both practically and cosmologically. Fundamentally, I am asking what does it mean to be building (infrastructure, job opportunities, hope) on something that is dying; what does this kind of existential juxtaposition do to the process of getting on with living and how to we meaningfully talk about it?