Reef Credits are an innovative, market-based solution offering a new way to improve the quality of water entering the Great Barrier Reef. The program was conceived in response to the consensus that a market-mechanism to incentivise water quality improvements across catchments of the Great Barrier Reef was urgently needed. View a map of the Great Barrier Reef catchment. 

Reef Credits enable landholders to undertake projects that improve water quality through changes in land management activities to generate a tradeable unit of pollutant reduction or ‘Reef Credit’. A Reef Credit represents a quantifiable volume of nutrient, pesticide or sediment prevented from entering the Great Barrier Reef catchment.

The relative value of pollutant reduction from nutrient, sediment or pesticide is set using the reef wide pollution reduction targets described in the Reef 2050 Water Quality Improvement Plan (2018). A Reef Credit can be sold to those seeking to invest in water quality improvements in the Great Barrier Reef, such as government, private industry and philanthropists.