A self-financing engine for
community ocean regeneration.

Coastal communities are the people best placed to protect the tropical ocean for good. For decades, the economics have given them little reason to.

Conservation has treated ocean protection as a funding problem. We treat it as an enterprise problem.

Fishing pays a family today, in cash, every day. Protection pays later, to everyone at once, and much of the benefit goes to the ecosystem and to the next generation. For a family on the water, the daily choice comes down to what feeds the household this week.

The conservation sector has answered with grants, livelihood supplements and awareness programmes that run alongside fishing. When the money runs out, management often stops and fishing resumes. Protection has rarely been made to pay for the communities doing it. CORE Zones are designed to change that.

Holothuria scabra: not just a seafood. A missing ecological engine.

Sea cucumbers were once common across tropical seagrass beds. Decades of harvesting have removed them from much of the near-shore habitat they once worked. Without them, less sediment is turned over and fewer nutrients are recycled back to the seagrass and the life around it.

Ranching sandfish inside a protected area puts them back to work while the whole area recovers. The farming and the regeneration happen in the same place, at the same time.

A-grade bêche-de-mer, ranched in community-protected seagrass.

Asili Company produces dried sandfish, Holothuria scabra, sold as A-grade bêche-de-mer (trepang). Our sandfish grow on the seagrass inside areas their communities have closed to fishing, not in overfished wild stocks, polluted water or intensive ponds.

Every batch is processed to strict quality protocols for international buyers and can be traced back to its site and community of origin. It is for buyers who care about provenance, purity and how their seafood is produced.

The window is closing

The opportunity is open