Last month I flew to Mombasa, a coastal town in Kenya for the West Indian Ocean (WIO) coral reef Red List of Ecosystems (RLE) Inception workshop from 12-15 March 2019. The workshop was co-organised by the IUCN and David Obura, Mishal Gudka and their team of experts at Coastal Oceans Research and Development – Indian Ocean East Africa (CORDIO EA)

The workshop was comprised of 30 specialists in coral reefs and marine ecosystems from governments and NGOs across 8 countries along the West Indian Ocean (Comoros, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, South Africa and Tanzania).

Myself, David Keith (University of New South Wales, Australia) and Marcos Valderrabano (IUCN) acted as the RLE trainers, presenting sessions on the foundations, concepts and applications of the RLE, along with detailed sessions on each RLE criteria. My task was to explain how to…