The Great Barrier Reef is a crucial regional provider of a range of ecosystem services, generating 58,000 jobs and contributing $5.4bn to Australia's annual GDP. Despite its significant value, its relatively robust conservation framework and significant public and private expenditure on remediation, the reef’s coral cover is declining rapidly. This is an outcome of well-understood anthropogenic stressors, particularly resulting from pollutants from diffuse terrestrial sources, but also from marine activities. These stressors reduce the reef’s resilience to rapid and linear phase change to macro-algal dominance and put at risk many of the benefits derived from it. Furthermore, the impact of these stressors diminish the reef’s capacity to adapt to climate change and ocean acidification. With significant warming and acidification already committed, to adapt and survive in anything like its current state (or better) the reef’s resilience needs to be improved; significantly and rapidly. I show how existing measures, at current levels of funding and scope of intervention, are unlikely to be sufficient to secure the future of the reef. Here, I explore how policy makers can leverage greater value from agents that benefit from reef ecosystem services through the adoption of a highly cost-heterogeneous marketplace for  ‘reef resilience’. This marketplace will ensure the most cost-effective measures are secured and a broader range of stressors are made subject to intervention and mitigation.