珊瑚移植的确可以恢复珊瑚礁以及依附于礁石而存在的生态系统，不过显然这一方法既耗费金钱又耗费人力，珊瑚礁的存活率也不能得到保证。可是正如日本环境省官员Hiroki Sato说的那样，如果我们什么都不做，珊瑚礁会继续消亡。

MARK WILLACY: Until now, the most common transplantation technique has been to break off pieces of coral and fix them elsewhere on the reef. The Japanese restoration project allows coral larvae to naturally attach itself to the ceramic disks, ensuring more genetic diversity. The program is being bankrolled by taxpayers' money. It's expensive and labour intensive.

HIROKI SATO, JAPANESE ENVIRONMENT MINISTRY (voiceover translation): Yes, it's expensive. The Environment Ministry invests tens of millions of yen in this project every year, but if we don't do anything, the coral will continue to die.

MARK WILLACY: Today, Professor Okamoto is surveying an area in the southern section of Sekesay Reef. Once teeming with marine life, the coral here is broken, grey and dead.

MINEO OKAMOTO (voiceover translation): This place was beautiful until the coral bleaching in 1998. Now there are no more fish swimming around the coral because everything is dead.

MARK WILLACY: If this reef is to be fully restored it will take tens of millions of individual coral transplants, and even if that can be achieved, it still won't address the root cause of the coral die-off. That, scientists here concede, is even beyond their capabilities.

OVE HOEGH-GULDBERG, MARINE SCIENTIST, UNI. OF QLD: Look, this is a great technique at a small scale, and, yes, you would have to call it a cosmetic approach. It certainly doesn't contribute a solution on a global scale to the problem that coral reefs are facing from global climate change.

MARK WILLACY: While the Japanese coral restoration project is seen as groundbreaking, it's still a case of two steps forward and one step back. Survival rates are often low, with bleaching and predators like the crown of thorns starfish accounting for about a third of the coral sprigs transplanted a few years ago.

MINEO OKAMOTO (voiceover translation): The survival rate differs according to location. In this reef the dead coral has become rubble, and when there are lots of waves, that dead coral moves and kills the transplanted coral.