Theresa (Teresa) Fyfe

And I'm here to tell you why you shouldn't give up either.

Prior to working at the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, I worked in medical research, and the parallels are surprisingly striking.

While many cancers have no cure, a cancer diagnosis is no longer a death sentence due to the expanding toolkit of treatments.

This is how we must think of coral reefs.

Yes, we need the cure, the solutions to climate change itself.

But right now, corals also need treatments to buy them time.

Reef restoration's been around since about the 1970s, mainly through coral gardening.

It's pretty simple.

You take small pieces of coral, you grow them in an underwater nursery, and when big enough, you replant them in a reef.

While an important part of the reef restoration toolkit, this approach is slow, expensive and very difficult to scale.

As a result, it is thought that less than 200,000 corals are planted across the world's oceans each year, with many of these corals not surviving.

We needed a breakthrough.

Over the past five years, 350 Australian scientists and engineers have been working on just that, technology to make reef restoration faster, cheaper and smarter.

We've made more advancements in the last five years than the previous 50.

Using an automated process, we can now produce millions of baby corals, not just thousands.

We can naturally increase the heat tolerance of these corals so they are better adapted to warming oceans.

And we have developed ceramic cradles for mass deployment, eliminating the need for divers to replant each piece of coral by hand.

But in a race against time, the key to dramatically scaling our impact is to deploy this technology in a highly targeted way.

We will focus our restoration solution on the reefs that are the most connected to other reefs via the ocean's natural currents.

By seeding these highly connected reefs with more heat-tolerant corals, their subsequent and stronger offspring will be spread far and wide.