Translating Bioengineering Principles to Coral Reef Restoration Under Climate Change
Abstract
Coral reefs support immense biodiversity and human well-being, yet accelerating environmental change is driving unprecedented losses of habitat-forming hard corals in recent decades and demands new strategies to strengthen reef resilience. Advances in bioengineering are expanding the controllable parameter space of living systems, enabling intervention at genetic, cellular, and microenvironmental scales, thereby creating new possibilities for scalable coral reef restoration. In this review, we synthesize recent bioengineering advances applied to coral restoration, focusing on key bottlenecks such as recruitment limitation, outplant survivorship, bleaching susceptibility, and early mortality These approaches include controlled-release surfaces for inductive settlement signals, antifouling and growth-optimized substrates, modular biofabrication platforms, targeted microbiome manipulation, and nanomaterial-mediated mitigation of oxidative stress. We argue that, if successfully translated at scale, bioengineering approaches could prove transformative for sustaining reef ecosystem function under accelerating climate change.
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