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Titouan Bernicot was born on a tiny atoll called Ahe in the Tuamotu Archipelago in the South Pacific, north-east of Tahiti. His parents, who are French, were pearl farmers – the kind of beautiful black pearls you find in that area of French Polynesia.
On the island there was no school, no supermarket and no telephones, and once a month a boat would bring supplies. Fewer than 100 people lived there, and Titouan was the only baby. “I was their teddy bear,” he says.
When he was four, the family moved to the island of Mo’orea, so that Titouan and his brother could go to school. He and his friends spent a lot of time surfing and diving with sharks; the ocean was their playground. They bought an aluminium boat, and one day, while they were waiting for the big waves to surf, Titouan noticed that the coral below had white spots, and some of it was completely white, when normally it was all the colours of the rainbow.
He went home and did some googling, and found out that the bleaching meant the coral was dying because the sea water was warming, and that 25 per cent of the world’s corals were gone. And now, 10 years later, it is 50 per cent. “But at that time,” he says, “I didn’t really know what coral was.”
At school, he did a project on coral, “and I fell in love with gardening corals, working with these little aliens. I said to my parents, ‘I’ve found what I want to do.’” And what began as something that he and his friends were messing about with in his bedroom is now a highly effective pioneering initiative called Coral Gardeners, which is dedicated to restoring coral reefs and revolutionising ocean conservation.
With an annual budget of $10m (£7.5m), Coral Gardeners employs 85 people, has thousands of applicants for jobs and a million Instagram followers. It is funded by, among others, Prada Group’s Sea Beyond initiative, in partnership with Unesco. Bernicot, 27, was included in the 2025 Time100 Climate list and was recently named on Forbes’s 30 Under 30 Europe list for 2026, in the “Social Impact” category.
Out of sight, out of mind
The first widespread coral-bleaching event occurred in the 1980s, followed by a global bleaching event in 1998. It is now a frequent phenomenon. The impact of losing coral reefs cannot be underestimated, because although they cover less than 0.1 per cent of the ocean floor, they are home to more than a quarter of all known marine species – complex structures that provide shelter from predators for countless species of fish and are essential for biodiversity.
It’s easy for the significance of what’s happening to go under the radar, because for most people, coral reefs are out of sight. But the reefs around Mo’orea have been closely studied for more than 50 years, and this is where I went to meet Bernicot, to see what his little army of coral conservationists is up to.
A 45-minute ferry from Tahiti, Mo’orea rises up out of the sea in a thick, spiky mass. Dramatically green mountains shrouded in mist loom up from the centre of the island, which is surrounded by interesting ocean currents, darting about diagonally. On my third morning, I was having breakfast overlooking the beach when three little fins swam by. Sharks. Not dangerous ones – blacktip reef sharks – but thrilling nonetheless.
The headquarters of Coral Gardeners hums with energy and good humour. They moved here seven years ago, from Bernicot’s bedroom. It is set on the waterfront, and half of it is open-air, with a large wooden platform built around a sacred tamanu tree. There are 25 full-time employees based here (and outposts in Fiji and Thailand), and the team is mostly local, along with some imported experts – scientific input is crucial to their work – including Hannah Stewart, director of science and research and development, who has worked here since 2023, having been science director at Tetiaroa (Marlon Brando’s atoll); and tropical marine biologist Giovanni Chimienti, who teaches at the University of Bari in southern Italy.
This week, Prada ambassador Benedict Cumberbatch is also here, with his family. Wearing a bucket hat, he gives a little talk on his involvement and shows himself to be a bit of a coral nerd. “This is a fantastic hands-on model for how you can intervene to create real change,” he says. “It’s given me profound hope.”
Bernicot is a dynamic character. When he realised, aged 18, that coral was his future, he started knocking on scientists’ doors. “They told me to finish high school then do a master’s and a PhD, and I thought, f--- that. Eleven years at school before I can have any impact? You’re crazy, and one day I will hire you! I went back to my house and said, ‘We are going to create the biggest movement on the planet to save the coral.’ My little brother was my first gardener. I started selling Tahitian pearls to fund Coral Gardeners. We want to do things differently and revolutionise ocean conservation. We don’t have the luxury of being able to study anymore,” he says. “Now we need action.”
There are more than 6,000 species of coral, both hard and soft. Coral is an animal, not a plant, colonies of tiny polyps housing symbiotic microalgae that provide oxygen and food through photosynthesis. The polyps use calcium carbonate extracted from the sea water to create the reefs, and the resulting colonies can grow for hundreds of years. You only need to watch Blue Planet or Ocean to be floored by the beauty, colour and complexity of life within and around a coral reef. In deep-sea ecosystems, corals can live for thousands of years.
“They have been on this planet since before the dinosaurs and their beauty is in their perfection,” says Chimienti, who comes from a farming family in Sardinia and didn’t learn to swim until he was a teenager. He has dived to depths of 100m, where he saw black corals, thousands of years old. “They remain unchanged – which means they are almost perfect and have no need to evolve. We think of corals as very vulnerable, but the strategies that corals put in place to survive are amazing. They are more resilient than we think.” Yet a deep-sea trawler dragging heavy nets across the ocean floor can wipe them out in seconds.
The greatest threat to coral, as we all know by now, is warming sea temperatures and changing ocean chemistry that causes the coral to bleach, a stress response, prompting the polyps to eject their algae, so the corals lose their colour and main food source and die.
Coral Gardeners’ method is to grow coral from healthy fragments and then replant it. They establish “tables” in nurseries in strategic places in the shallow waters of the ocean: 12 ropes running between poles standing on the seabed, each with about 30 fragments of coral of varying ages attached. These take about two years to grow to a football-sized clump, large enough to be replanted. They are then carefully transferred to a specially chosen outplanting area. The fish go too, and anything else that has set up residence.
The Gardeners use fragments of what they call “super corals”. There are constant studies to identify these more resilient genotypes. If this sounds almost literally like a drop in the ocean, consider this: more than 221,000 corals have been planted around the world since 2017, including 100,000 corals currently growing in nurseries across French Polynesia, Fiji and Thailand. There is a survival rate of 80 to 85 per cent in those that have been replanted. We go out on the boat to see the nurseries in action and, equipped with masks, snorkels and flippers, plop into the water at Tiaia, the largest site, which has four nurseries with 15 tables.
It’s nothing compared with viewing fully functioning reefs, but just swimming around the nurseries and looking at the little lumps of coral, many with several vividly coloured tropical fish nosing around, is hypnotic. Coral Gardeners has invented a special smartphone reef app to monitor the growth of the coral and track the biodiversity, information that is then shared with other projects around the world.
“It now takes three days to monitor an entire reef, unlike 30 days like it used to,” says Bernicot. “We are using technology to gain time.”
They use reef cams, powered by solar panels, to judge the health of a reef by the fish community. The DNA contained in a water sample will reveal how many species of fish are around. I am a slightly inept snorkeller, and Stewart is guiding me around the nurseries when she sees a malevolent-looking spiky black clump – it’s a taramea starfish, local villain and enemy of the coral. She picks it up carefully with her gloved hands to bring back to HQ.
Every fish has a positive role to play in the reef community, except, it seems, the taramea – or crown-of-thorns starfish – which is a deadly predator of the coral. It’s like something out of a horror film: the taramea feeds on the coral, releasing digestive enzymes that turn the polyps into soup, and they can destroy entire reefs. Every few years, Stewart tells me, there is a big outbreak of them, often coinciding with cyclones and storms.
“The locals here will always know in advance. They’ll say, ‘There’s going to be a cyclone and the taramea are coming.’” They do have predators, such as a gastropod called the triton. “But there’s not many of them around because they have a really beautiful shell and people collect them.” The taramea can’t climb up the poles and get to the nursery, but around the monitored reefs, “we do taramea sweeps, and inject them with vinegar, which kills them”.
Back at base, Stewart buries it so that it won’t release eggs. Bernicot tells us about how things really took off for him in 2015 when a one-minute video he made with Instagram celebrity and model Alexis Ren went viral. “In two days, we reached 80 million views from one Instagram post. For many it’s just a number, but it’s so important for us to be able to connect our tiny project with the world. Conservation needs to be fun,” he says.
He introduced the idea of people adopting corals via Instagram and tracking them online. “We had Paris Hilton adopting corals for Britney Spears’s birthday! We now have 20,000 coral adopters.”
“We need to rebrand conservation,” he enthuses. “And that’s why I’m excited to be working with Prada; they know how to make things cool.”
Coral Gardeners is supported by Sea Beyond, an initiative launched by Prada Group in partnership with Unesco IOC in 2019. Sea Beyond raises awareness of sustainability and ocean preservation through training initiatives for younger generations. Education is the main focus, but over the years, Sea Beyond has extended its scope to support scientific research, community engagement and policy advocacy.
Lorenzo Bertelli is Prada Group’s chief marketing officer and head of corporate social responsibility, and the driving force behind Sea Beyond. He is particularly proud of the fact that Brazil has recently committed to introducing ocean literacy to its national curriculum. “For me, this is a direct result of what we’ve developed with Unesco and their Blue School Global Network.” (Today, there are 8,000 Blue Schools around the world.)
“For a country as big as Brazil to implement this is an incredible achievement, and this is just the beginning. Another thing I am proud of is the Sea Beyond Ocean Literacy Centre in Venice, which opened last year. The ocean now has a physical space where people can learn by doing.”
Also in Venice is the Kindergarten of the Lagoon, for Venetian pre-school children to foster a link with the ocean through outdoor activities. You may well wonder why it is organisations such as Prada Group that are helping to fund these important initiatives and not governments, but French Polynesia is actually one of the first countries to take strong action to protect the ocean. As of 2025, it holds the title for the world’s largest Marine Protected Area, spanning 23 per cent of the archipelago’s waters, of which more than 400,000 square miles (almost twice the size of France) is designated as highly protected. Bottom-trawling, deep-sea mining and long-line fishing are illegal there.
So there are grounds for optimism. Francesca Santoro, senior programme officer at Unesco, tells me why she thinks Coral Gardeners stands out: “So many restoration projects are very technical, and managed by science groups, but they don’t have the community engagement, which is key. Bernicot is such a positive person – normally the environmental world is all doom and gloom.”
Bernicot’s goal is to plant half a million corals by 2030, with operations in 10 countries around the world. “When I go to schools and see kids who are so much more aware than I was at that age, it really gives me hope,” he says. “And we focus on optimism. When the team emerges after five hours in the water, they are so proud of what they are doing, and seeing the fish come back and the coral growing – that really gives you a lot of hope.”
Prada’s Re-Nylon Collection is made with discarded nylon from textile waste, plastics from landfills and fishing nets. As of 2023, 1 per cent of proceeds from the collection goes to Sea Beyond, which directly supports Coral Gardeners (coralgardeners.org).
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