A living reef sits 600 feet off South Beach. Miami needs to protect it | Opinion

Miami returns to the water every summer without fully knowing what is in it. Six hundred feet off South Beach, close enough to reach by swimming from shore, sits a living coral reef that most residents have never heard of. The Neon Reef is not remote. It has simply never been part of the story Miami tells about itself.

Miami depends on the ocean as scenery, identity, economic engine and the front line of climate risk. Biscayne Bay alone generates an estimated $64 billion in annual economic output and supports close to 450,000 jobs. Offshore, the Florida Reef Tract, the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States, has lost roughly 90% of its coral cover since the late 1970s. Miami is surrounded by marine systems it cannot afford to lose and has largely not learned to see.

June is World Ocean Month, and this year’s global theme, Strong Marine Protected Areas for Our Blue Planet, reflects a moment when roughly 10% of the world’s ocean now carries some form of formal protection, still only a third of the way toward the 30% goal nations have set for 2030. The places that will determine whether that goal is met are not remote. They are places like this.

World Ocean Celebration (WOC), Miami’s largest ocean festival, has spent six years making the ocean tangible to the city that lives beside it, through hands-on ocean experiences, beach cleanups, panels on ocean science and policy, youth education and film. This year, the festival organized a community guided snorkel to the Neon Reef, with water safety support and an on-site lesson on the reef’s ecological significance. It was also the first year WOC put forward a direct call to action on reef protection, a petition that gathered over 500 signatures in its initial launch.

Urban Paradise Guild (UPG), a strategic partner of WOC and the Neon Reef guided snorkel, is a Miami nonprofit that has spent years documenting the reef and building the case for its protection. UPG is calling for two specific changes. The first is an extension of the vessel-exclusion zone to encompass the reef within its boundary. The second is the establishment of a Miami Beach Marine Park, bringing this stretch of nearshore waters under formal protection for the first time.

For years, the vessel-exclusion line off this stretch of South Beach ran without any reference to the reef, leaving healthy coral on the wrong side of its own protection. UPG divers have documented anchors dropped directly onto coral and boats coming in close proximity to snorkelers at high speed. A reef that predates the city has never been written into its basic traffic rules.

REEFLINE, now open to snorkelers off 4th Street in South Beach, is a planned seven-mile underwater sculpture park, snorkel trail, and hybrid reef connecting habitat creation, coral restoration, public access and contemporary art. Together with the Neon Reef, the park makes visible what this stretch of coastline contains and what would be lost without protecting it.

The argument for protecting this corridor is not only aesthetic, though the beauty of what divers find there is part of what makes its neglect so frustrating. It is also ecological. Coral reefs reduce incoming wave energy by up to 97%, providing coastal protection no seawall can replicate. Florida’s reef system supports 71,000 jobs in South Florida and generates more than $1 billion for the local economy annually. The Neon Reef needs no permit, no boat, no expedition. It sits at the edge of one of the country’s busiest beaches and still has no formal protection. In a city that has built its identity on its relationship to the water, that position is harder to defend every year.

Miami has spent decades selling the ocean as one of its defining pleasures. It now has the chance to treat the waters off South Beach as one of its defining responsibilities.

Ombretta Agró Andruff is founder and executive director of ARTSail and co-founder of World Ocean Celebration. Adam Steckley is co-founder and executive director of Blue Scholars Initiative and co-founder of World Ocean Celebration. You can sign the petition here.