New report provides options for financing MPAs

Looking to supplement your MPA’s funding? A new report provides a list of 30 mechanisms for financing the conservation of marine biodiversity. Published by WWF (an NGO) through its Center for Conservation Finance, Financing Marine Conservation: A Menu of Options outlines potential sources of funding, with brief examples of how the mechanisms have been used worldwide. For readers who want more information on particular mechanisms – ranging from conservation trust funds, to tourism entry fees, to fishing and mining access fees, and more – the report provides web links to external sources of expertise.

Melissa Moye, director of the Center for Conservation Finance, says the report is designed to help practitioners determine what they need. “The examples are the easiest way to help MPA managers and others identify mechanisms that might work for their specific case,” she says. The report leads readers through a series of questions intended to gauge the feasibility of options.

Moye co-wrote the report with Barry Spergel, formerly of WWF and now a private consultant, who authored a similar, though not marine-focused, report in 2001, Raising Revenues for Protected Areas: A Menu of Options (MPA News 3:10). Both reports are available online in PDF format on the website of the WWF Center for Conservation Finance, at http://www.worldwildlife.org/conservationfinance.

For more information: Melissa Moye, Center for Conservation Finance, World Wildlife Fund, 1250 24th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20037-1124, USA. Tel: +1 202 778 9678; E-mail: melissa.moye@wwfus.org


New book: lessons learned from Bunaken National Park

Lessons learned from five years of developing a collaborative management system at an Indonesian MPA have been compiled in a new book, Building Effective Co-Management Systems for Decentralized Protected Areas Management in Indonesia: Bunaken National Park Case Study. The book examines development of Bunaken National Park’s co-management board, involvement of stakeholders in management, and development of a collaborative enforcement scheme for the park, among other aspects of the Bunaken experience. To order a printed copy, e-mail Mark Erdmann, a co-author of the book, at erdmann@nrm.or.id. The book is also available online at http://www.nrm.or.id. Follow the links to documents/reports/technical reports.


Report details rehabilitation of delta in Mauritania, including national park

An 11-year project to rehabilitate thriving wetlands in Mauritania’s 160-km2 Diawling National Park – which had turned desert-like following construction of a nearby dam that cut off water flow in 1990 – is documented in a new report from IUCN. The Rehabilitation of the Delta of the Senegal River in Mauritania describes how resource managers used artificial flooding to re-establish diverse estuarine and mangrove ecosystems in the park and surrounding region. Waterbird counts and fish catches have risen exponentially since the project began, consistent with the park’s objectives to promote biodiversity conservation and sustainable development among local populations.

“The Diawling project shows that the ecosystem approach, when applied to the restoration of a severely damaged wetland, can have very positive effects on both livelihoods and biodiversity,” says report co-author Olivier Hamerlynck, a former technical advisor to the project. Core funding for the project was provided by the Ministry of Development Cooperation of the Netherlands, through the IUCN Wetlands and Water Resources Programme, and by the French Global Environment Facility. The report is available online in French and English at http://www.iucn.org/themes/wetlands.


Meeting to be held to seek consensus on marine reserve science

Recent issues of MPA News have exhibited some of the international dialogue among researchers on marine reserve science and the effectiveness of reserves in fisheries management (MPA News 5:6 and 5:7). Such discussions may benefit from an upcoming conference in the US in June. To be convened by the National Fisheries Conservation Center (a US-based NGO), the conference will seek consensus in the debate over reserve usefulness for fisheries by bringing together scientists, managers, fishermen, and conservationists, among other stakeholders. The website for the Consensus Conference on Integrating Marine Reserve Science and Fishery Management, to be held June 7-9, 2004, in Long Beach, California, is at http://nfcc-fisheries.org/consensus.