Coral Restoration You Can Actually Do in Padangbai
Most dive tourism asks you to look and not touch. The Living Seas Foundation in Padangbai, roughly 50 km northeast of Denpasar on Bali's southern coast, inverts that logic entirely. Visitors here attach live coral fragments to handmade steel structures, lower them onto degraded reef, and leave with a name tag marking their contribution. The reef grows. The business grows. The community earns. It is a tidy argument against the idea that tourism and conservation are fundamentally at odds.
From Dive Shop to Charitable Foundation
The project traces back to Singaporean dive operator Leon Boey, who opened a dive business in Indonesia in 2015. Watching local coral decline rapidly, Boey and his team began testing materials for an artificial reef substrate. The pandemic, which gutted dive tourism globally, gave the team time to develop the concept seriously. By 2020, active restoration work had begun under the banner of the Living Seas Foundation.
The centrepiece of the method is the 'reef star': a hexagonal steel frame coated in resin and sand, designed to anchor coral fragments securely while the surrounding ecosystem recovers. A pontoon just outside Padangbai harbour serves as the staging point. Visitors attach fragments to a star, personalise it with a name tag, then dive or snorkel to watch it join the growing network on the seabed.
As first reported by Dive Magazine, around 8,000 square metres of reef had been restored by the time of their coverage, out of a planned 5-hectare target. Since 2020, 24 local Indonesians have been trained to dive, snorkel, and transplant coral as part of the programme.
The Business Case Boey Doesn't Hide
Boey is candid about the economics. The reef stars are manufactured in-house, keeping costs controllable. Visitors pay for the structure and the guided experience. More visitors means more stars, which means more reef. Staff earn stable incomes, and the surrounding community benefits from accommodation, food, and transport spending.
"I like to call that the quadruple win, where everyone, including and especially nature, wins," Boey told Dive Magazine.
He prefers the term 'restorative tourism' over 'eco-tourism', arguing that any travel carries a negative footprint and that the honest response is to do something measurably positive while you are there, whether planting coral, trees, or vegetables.
The experience is now listed through TUI Musement, the in-destination experiences arm of TUI, one of Europe's largest tourism companies. TUI's charitable arm, the TUI Care Foundation, supports Living Seas through its Sea the Change programme, placing a niche reef restoration project on a mainstream global platform for the first time.
Why It Matters for Hosts
Independent operators in Padangbai and the wider east Bali corridor have a concrete opportunity here. The Living Seas site, once avoided because it was rubble, now attracts multiple dive centres. Guesthouses, warungs, and transport providers all benefit from the visitors the foundation draws. If you host divers or snorkellers, familiarising yourself with the Living Seas programme and being able to point guests toward it adds genuine value to a stay without requiring any investment on your part. Conservation-curious travellers are a growing segment, and a referral to a project this tangible is more persuasive than a generic 'eco-friendly' label on your listing.
Details in this post were first reported by Mark 'Crowley' Russell for Dive Magazine. This post is published by the Qontaktly travel blog. For more on the Living Seas Foundation, visit livingseasfoundation.org.
First reported by Bali Travel.