Ocean Policy · Marine Tourism

Coron Writes Dive Standards Into Municipal Policy

The Municipality of Coron has adopted Green Fins diving and snorkelling standards by resolution, tying local reef rules to a national framework. The evidence behind it is Coron’s own, and the harder policy work is still ahead.

By SEVENSEAS Media | Ocean Conservation

The Municipality of Coron, in Palawan, has passed a resolution adopting Environmentally-Friendly Diving and Snorkeling practices for the operators who work its reefs and wrecks. On paper it is a short document from the council of a town of roughly 69,000 people. In practice it moves the Green Fins standards out of the voluntary space they have occupied in the Philippines since 2017 and into a municipality’s own rulebook, in one of the country’s busiest dive destinations.

The resolution was announced by The Reef-World Foundation, which coordinates Green Fins internationally with the UN Environment Programme, as the closing act of its work under the GEF South China Sea Strategic Action Programme. According to Reef-World, the text embeds the Green Fins guidelines into local coastal resource management through the Department of Environment and Natural Resources’ Coastal and Marine Ecosystems Management Program, the same national vehicle that has carried Green Fins in the Philippines since a 2017 technical bulletin gave provincial and regional governments a legal hook for it.

What the resolution actually attaches to

The significant word in the announcement is alignment. A municipal resolution is not an ordinance. It expresses the council’s policy position and, in this case, formally adopts a set of practices already recognised nationally and internationally, rather than creating a new enforcement regime with penalties attached. Reef-World says local stakeholders are now working towards a broader coastal resource management ordinance intended to secure those gains, which is a fair signal that the current instrument is a first step rather than a finished one.

Coron municipal councilor Hon. Michael Sadhwani and Community Environment and Natural Resources Officer Clarissa Pador presented the resolution during a regional webinar, “Connected by Currents”, which Reef-World says drew 176 participants from across the Green Fins network. Dr Michael Joshua Wong, head of environment, health, wellness and sustainability at Discovery Coron, set out how a dive operator works alongside local government on this; the group’s Club Paradise holds Green Fins Certified Gold membership.

The numbers, and what they measure

Data presented through the project, Reef-World says, shows Green Fins certified operators in Coron achieving an average 47 per cent reduction in environmental threat scores on local reefs, with operator retention in the programme running at 77–83 per cent. The same pair of figures appeared in Reef-World’s March 2026 account of the regional workshop in Bali that preceded this phase, where they were attributed specifically to Coron rather than to the network as a whole.

It is worth being precise about what a threat score is. Green Fins assessments rate an operator’s practices against the initiative’s code of conduct, covering things like anchoring, fish feeding, chemical discharge and briefing quality. A 47 per cent reduction therefore describes a measured change in what operators do. It is not a measurement of coral cover, fish biomass or reef condition, and the release does not claim it is. The retention figure matters for a different reason: a certification scheme that operators quietly drop out of after a year produces impressive first-round numbers and very little else.

“We have proven that when you give data-driven tools to the industry, the threats to our reefs drop by nearly half. Mobilising the operators of diving and snorkelling tours is building the real infrastructure of Coron’s sustainable Blue Economy.”

Dev Albao, Programmes Manager, The Reef-World Foundation

Coron and Bali, still under review

The other thread running through the project is a proposed Green Fins “Partner Sites” arrangement between Coron and Bali. Reef-World describes it as a pilot for cross-border knowledge sharing, joint data collection and shared threat management across a biodiversity corridor that the two countries genuinely do share; the March account noted that an estimated 5 to 8 per cent of visitors to the Coral Triangle travel to more than one country in it. That account also described the agreement as under review, and nothing in the September announcement says it has been concluded. Treat it as a framework in progress.

Alongside the policy work, the project produced a joint policy brief, technical briefs and a regional citizen science strategy aimed at dive tourism managers and operators. The pitch is the familiar one for citizen science in this region, that operator-led and community-led monitoring can fill gaps where government survey capacity does not stretch. It is a reasonable pitch. It is also, so far, a set of documents rather than a monitoring record.

“The fact that Indonesia and the Philippines are already progressing well with Green Fins means that we can start here, and then expand to other countries within the Coral Triangle Region. Given the rapid development of tourism in the region there is an urgent need to ensure that this sector develops sustainably.”

Anders Poulsen, Senior Project Manager, SCS-SAP Project

The part a dive resolution cannot reach

Reef-World frames the Coral Triangle as a US$24.7 billion asset in nature-based tourism supporting some 140 million coastal residents, a figure it has used consistently since March. The framing is useful for ministries and unhelpful in one specific way: it invites the assumption that protecting the asset is mainly a question of how divers behave in the water. In Coron it is not.

The town’s recent environmental record is dominated by land-side pressure rather than in-water behaviour. In 2022 the DENR cancelled the environmental compliance certificate for the Coron Bay reclamation project and acknowledged lapses in its own monitoring of a project that had extended reclaimed land across three villages. Years earlier, hundreds of establishments in the town were cited over coastal easement violations. A resolution on diving and snorkelling practice does not touch any of that, and should not be read as though it does. What it does is set a standard for the one sector that is organised, assessable and already willing to be counted, which is a sensible place to start and an incomplete place to stop.

What to watch

Three things will tell you whether this holds. Whether the coastal resource management ordinance actually passes, since that is where enforcement and budget would live. Whether the Coron and Bali partner sites agreement clears review and produces shared data rather than a signing photograph. And whether Coron’s operator retention stays in that 77 to 83 per cent band once the project funding, and the staff it paid for, have moved on. Green Fins has been running for more than two decades and has survived the end of plenty of project cycles. The test for Coron is the ordinary one: what is still standing in three years.

Further reading: The Reef-World Foundation and the Green Fins initiative, coordinated with the UN Environment Programme. This work was funded by the Global Environment Facility South China Sea Strategic Action Programme with support from UNEP and the United Nations Office for Project Services.

SEVENSEAS Media · Conservation Journalism for the Ocean