Coral reef specialist and scientist Dr Camilla Floros will be a speaker at BOAT International's Ocean Talks 2025, taking place at The Magazine, the Serpentine North Gallery in London on 12 June. Ahead of the event, Lucy Dunn sat down with her to talk about her work educating local communities in East Africa to look after their marine resources.
Dr Camilla Floros has over 20 years of experience in marine conservation across the Western Indian Ocean. As principal scientist and marine programme manager for Oceans Without Borders (OWB) – a partnership between luxury travel company &Beyond and conservation advocates Wild Impact – she helps protect critical habitats in Tanzania and Mozambique, empowering marine rangers to conduct research, raise awareness and lead local conservation projects.
Dr Camilla Flores knows her patch. "My parents loved to travel, and on one of our many travels, they came across the Bazaruto archipelago in East Africa [and] they fell in love with it instantly. They took us there on many, many holidays, that's where I fell in love with coral reefs, their beauty and abundance."
Her passion for the oceans kickstarted a career in marine science, which eventually brought her back to Bazaruto, where she became the principal scientist for Oceans Without Borders (OWB), a joint programme with Wild Impact and travel company &Beyond which focuses on sustainable marine practices in the area.
She has witnessed firsthand how much the area has changed over the years due to climate change and human impact, "The longer we stayed there, the more we interacted with the communities and got to know the islands and the reefs, the more we saw the different harvesting methods they were using," she recalls. "They relied on these marine resources for everything, but they were dragging long nets over the seagrass beds, pulling up all sorts of marine creatures, some edible, some inedible, some of them juveniles. And they were breaking the coral, and I just started to ask some questions about whether there was a sustainable way that communities could use these resources. So I think that was the start where I wanted to protect coral reefs…"
OWB's conservation projects are varied and Flores stresses there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to conservation, often depending on the challenges of the area. "The Bazaruto Archipelago, for example, is well known for its megafauna, so whales, whale sharks and other sharks. It's also known for its dugongs, which are an endangered species and the last viable population within the western Indian Ocean, so it's a really, really important habitat."
Other projects include establishing a coral nursery in Mnemba Island on the north-east coast of Tanzania, where Flores’ team started a coral nursery in 2021 and worked closely with the Ministry of the Economy to establish a protection area to reduce the number of tourist boats visiting the reef. "The reefs were being significantly degraded by the intense tourism pressure, so we started a nursery to try and propagate coral, and since then, we have planted 1000s of what we call micro-colonies onto the natural reefs and also onto artificial structures."
Flores and her team have used heat-tolerant corals in their work. "We call them ‘super coral'", she explains."When a bleaching event happens, they are species or genotypes that prove the most resilient or resistant; they don't bleach in turn white and they can bounce back."
Communities who live in these areas live on the breadline and rely on fishing or tourism for their livelihoods. But they need to be educated on how to conserve the resources they have. Floros stresses that her work depends on the local rangers who work at ground level, spreading the message and using their local knowledge. "We recruit our rangers from the surrounding communities and upskill them. They are at the heart of our work [and are] really at the core of what we do. We could not operate without them. They are our champions, our stewards, our voice of marine conservation. And they can take that message back to their communities way better than we can."
Floros says that Indigenous communities also have the insider knowledge that scientists don’t possess. "They have built such long-term relationships with the environment that they live in and know the biodiversity hotspots."
Floros can see how the changes they’re making have affected an area she has known since her childhood. "I’m just so proud that I've done this big circle, and I can come back to the place where it all started for me, and I'm working with such an incredible team to make a difference there."
But it’s not all smooth sailing, she stresses. "It's not just the local threats that we're trying to combat, it's also global threats. Although we've definitely seen an improvement in the coral cover, last year we had a significant bleaching event, where the corals turned white from elevated sea temperatures and we lost so many corals within our coral nursery. So we just are fighting fires on so many levels. You win some, and take a couple steps back. But we have to just keep moving forward…"
You can meet Camilla at Ocean Talks on 12 June 2025, our annual event celebrating ocean conservation efforts in the week running up to World Oceans Day. Tickets are free, but guests must register their attendance.
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