{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Show Me the Receipts: Why I.CARE Monitors Every Coral It Plants","description":"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 papers describe a structural, field-wide problem. It also lands at a genuinely uncertain moment for funding: Florida's 2023 executive order promised to restore a quarter of the state's reef tract by 2050, but as of the 2026\u20132027 budget cycle, neither the state House nor Senate proposal funded the program's second phase, leaving over a dozen research groups and nonprofits needing to shuffle funding. That's exactly why I.CARE's visitor-funded model and its radical transparency about outcomes, good and bad, matter more right now than they would in a world of stable government funding. This is episode four of a four-part week built around Andrew's interview with Mike Goldberg, co-founder of I.CARE, airing Friday. Takeaways: Checking on 100 percent of what's planted, instead of a sample, is unusual in this field, and it's the specific practice Mike credits with earning donor trust. I.CARE didn't stop reporting its numbers during a bad year (the 2023 bleaching event). That's arguably the real test of whether transparency is a genuine practice or just a marketing line. Field-wide, peer-reviewed research backs up how unusual this actually is: most coral restoration projects worldwide get monitored for a year or less, and close to half don't even measure the goals they originally set out to hit, a gap recent research frames as a real greenwashing risk for the field. A spot check of a fraction of what's actually in the water can't tell you the truth about the rest of it, and representing it as if it can misrepresents the real outcome to the people funding the work. State and federal funding for Florida's own coral restoration effort is genuinely uncertain right now, documented independently of Mike's interview, which is exactly the kind of risk a visitor-funded, trust-based model is built to survive. website: https:\/\/icareaboutcoral.org\/ ","author_name":"How To Protect The Ocean","author_url":"https:\/\/www.speakupforblue.com\/show\/speak-up-for-the-ocean-blue\/","html":"