Lady Elliot Island, on the southern edge of the Great Barrier Reef, Australia was host to a workshop titled “Responding to Climate Change: A workshop for Coral Reef Managers”  from 30 July to 3 August.  The workshop was attended by 32 reef managers and coral reef scientists from South East Asia, Australia and the United States. Discussed were the implications for climate change on coral reefs and practical steps that reef mangers could undertake to reduce this threat. We investigated how measures of reef resilience could be incorporated into our daily work of designing protected areas and assessing the health of coral reefs.  With the novel use of a glass bottom boat, we viewed and discussed aspects of the reef and compared ways in which reef resilience variables could be qualitatively but systematically recorded. Currently no standard methods are available for incorporating reef resilience variables into protected area design and planning and incorporating these into marine resource planning. Issues of ranking and weighting variables and procedures for evaluating “reef resilience” were discussed. This led to some vigorous discussion on ways to systematically evaluate complex factors such as variability in temperature at a given site, the potential for connectivity with other reefs and substrate suitability for recovery. The exercise was used to score two “test” reefs using qualitative measures of 26 resilience factors – the outcome was a relatively consistent set of scores among group members and agreement on the relative resilience of reefs examined.