Five sites in the Philippines, including the Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park (TRNP), have been named among candidates for a marine protected area (MPA) management project in the Asean to be implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The TRNP, a popular diving destination in Palawan, is a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization World Heritage Site, an Asean Heritage Park, and a known sea bird sanctuary.
Besides TRNP in the Sulu-Celebes Sea, the four MPA candidates in the Philippines are the Ticao-Burias Pass Protected Seascape in Masbate province, Bicol region; Agoo Damortis Protected Landscape and Seascape in La Union province; Bani-Bolinao-Burgos-Infanta, Dasol-Agno MPA Network in Pangasinan province; and Turtle Islands Wildlife Sanctuary in Tawi-Tawi province in Mindanao.
The Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) recently convened the stakeholders of the project titled, “Effectively Managing Networks of Marine Protected Areas in Large Marine Ecosystems [LME] in Asean [Enmaps],” to gather and consolidate data as it is scheduled to submit its project proposal to Global Environment Facility (GEF) by March 2023.
The sites being chosen for Enmaps are biodiversity-rich sites that also face threats of environmental degradation.
Beneficiaries of the project are Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.
Other Asean LME sites under the project are the Gulf of Thailand, Andaman Sea of the Bay of Bengal, the Indonesian Seas and the South China Sea.
The Asean Enmaps project will be executed by the Asean Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) in collaboration with the DENR’s Biodiversity Management Bureau (BMB).
It includes national technical working groups from the Foreign Assisted and Special Projects Services of the DENR; the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources; National Fisheries Research and Development Institute; and the intergovernmental organization Partnerships in Environmental Management for the Seas of East Asia.
The coastal and marine biodiversity of Asean are known to have 20 percent of the world’s seagrass beds, a third of the world’s mangrove forests with 45 to 75 tree species, and a third of the world’s coral reefs with more than 75 percent of species of coral and 40 percent of fish species.
The GEF, multilateral environmental fund, has been concerned that the world’s oceans have been reaching their ecological carrying capacity, a limit to their ability to produce fish for food.
“More than 75 percent of world fish stocks are already fully exploited, overexploited, depleted or recovering from depletion,” according to the GEF web site.
Enmaps aims to develop and improve the management of networks of MPAs and marine corridors within selected LMEs in the Asean region.
It likewise aims to conserve globally significant biodiversity and support for sustainable fisheries for people’s livelihood and other ecosystem goods and services.
GEF has supported sustainable governance of 23 LMEs involving the collaborative work of many countries. The world’s oceans is known to be divided into 66 LMEs.
This area covers 7.7 million square kilometers with 173,000 km of coastline.
LMEs are huge marine areas extending beyond boundaries among countries which is why collaboration is important. Enmaps has a cost of $77.596 million. Of this, $12.548 million consists of GEF grants.
Image credits: Jun V Lao/Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0