Each forum features a session, held not in a conference room but on a traditional sailing vessel anchored in the bay. In 2025, an elder from the Torres Strait Islands presented seasonal coral spawning data, recorded on hand-drawn charts over 90 years, that corrected a key assumption in a UN climate model about larval dispersion. This data is now integrated into the official Nata Ocean Atlas .
Born from a 2018 Nata workshop, Coral Vita is now the world’s largest network of land-based coral farms, growing super-corals that are resilient to warmer, more acidic water. They have restored over 1 million square meters of reef in the Bahamas, Maldives, and Micronesia. nata ocean forum
In 2021, a coalition formed at Nata successfully lobbied the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) to create a 1.8-million-square-kilometer MPA in the Weddell Sea. The forum’s real-time ship-tracking technology was used to expose illegal fishing vessels, providing the evidence needed for the designation. Each forum features a session, held not in