Palau International Coral Reef Center is happy to welcome Ben Carroll as our new Resilience Advisor!
As Resilience Advisor, Ben will provide specialist technical support to the “Resilient Reefs Initiative”, a new effort to build Palau’s resilience to climate change and environmental threats.
Ben brings over twenty years experience as a tropical fisheries and marine conservation biologist with work in both research and resource management. Before arriving in Palau, his career led him throughout the Pacific and Southeast Asia including American Samoa, Vanuatu, Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand and the Maldives.
Originally born and raised in Australia, Ben has been surrounded by the ocean from a young age.
“I was very fortunate to have grown up in a small, seaside town where I spent my childhood at the beach and in the ocean – surfing, snorkeling, diving, beach-combing, collecting shells and fish, and playing with my dog. An upbringing in such an idyllic and beautiful natural environment no doubt spawned and catalyzed my love of the ocean and coast, and nature in general, and it was perhaps a natural progression to pursue studies and a career dedicated to marine ecology and nature conservation.” said Ben.
The new “Resilient Reefs Initiative” brings together local communities, reef managers, and resilience experts and ultimately plans to produce a focused resilience strategy for Palau that will help fund on the ground actions and develop new management solutions to adapt to an uncertain future in the face of climate change and other unforeseen or unknown threats. By examining the strengths and weaknesses in societal and local governance systems, as well reef ecosystems, and by exploring the importance of interconnected threats to the reef and community, it hopes to highlight significant knowledge and management gaps and needs, and aims at developing a strategy accordingly.
The Center is supporting the Initiative in partnership with the Koror State Government and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation. Palau is one of five locations involved in the Initiative, along with the Belize Barrier Reef, the Lagoons of New Caledonia, and the Ningaloo Coast and Great Barrier Reef in Australia.
We are excited for Ben to join our team at the Center and look forward to working with him to strengthen Palau’s resilience and protect our coral reefs.