Disturbances are increasing in frequency and intensity, such that their impacts are accumulating and putting our marine ecosystems at risk. Efforts to manage these impacts include area protection to limit stressors, monitoring, and actions such as invasive species management and aquaculture. Decision science informs the planning and iteration of management; however, most approaches do not base disturbance probability estimates on observed data for the region, vary them spatially, or model the potential for their impacts to accumulate. More nuanced approaches are needed for managing environmental risks in our changing marine systems. We propose a method to include the probability and impacts of cumulative disturbances in marine management plans. We demonstrate the method in a case study of sample coral reefs in the Great Barrier Reef, where the management is our independent variable, and coral cover is our response variable. We show that using separate probabilities to represent the risk of single and cumulative disturbances in a management plan increases the optimal solution's benefits fourfold. By incorporating this approach into conservation management strategies, we can better allocate resources and prioritise efforts to maximise the resilience of ecosystems in the face of increasing cumulative events.