Sustainable Financing and Payments

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC) are focused on identifying innovative ways to effectively protect and restore critical ecosystems, such as coral reefs, in Asia and the Pacific. The need for funding and capacity to protect and restore coral reefs is too great to fill from any one source. The solution will require creative thinking and need to be multifaceted and diverse. The urgency of the crisis is too great to not invest now in identifying and developing innovative financial tools.

We are in a period of unprecedented growth in conservation philanthropy. How will this influx of private funding affect conservation agendas? Inspired by a collaborative research co-design process, this paper addresses questions about how foundations influence conservation agendas in the places they work. We draw from a case study of the world’s largest philanthropic funder of marine conservation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and their 20 years of investment in marine conservation in Palau and Fiji.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework envisages an increasing reliance on large-scale private finance to fund biodiversity targets. We warn that this may pose contradictions in delivering conservation outcomes and propose a critical ongoing role for direct public funding of conservation and public oversight of private nature-related financial mechanisms. 

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Community-based approaches to conservation and natural resource management are considered essential to meeting global conservation targets. Despite widespread adoption, there is little understanding about successful and unsuccessful community-based practices because of the challenges of designing robust evaluations to estimate impacts and analyse the underlying mechanisms to impact. Here we present findings from a national scale evaluation of the ‘locally managed marine areas’ network in Fiji, a marine community-based management initiative.

O Le Pupu-Pu'e National Park was the first Park established in Samoa at a time when the environment movement and concerns for our unique biodiversity and natural features was still only a passing thought. It has been forty-two years since the OLPPNP was established and the Park remains one of the as one of the few areas on Upolu island that has extensive protection from the ridge to reef.

Island and coastal nations need to protect their waters to keep the oceans healthy. But they often have lots of debt and aren't able to prioritize ocean conservation over other needs. The team at The Nature Conservancy sees a way to solve both problems at once: restructuring a nation's debt in exchange for its government's commitment to protect coastal areas. Learn more about how "Blue Bonds for Conservation" work -- and how you can help unlock billions of dollars for the oceans. This ambitious plan is a part of the Audacious Project, TED's initiative to inspire and fund global change.

Experiences from the Kiribati Ministry of Environment, Lands and Agricultural Development regarding their medium grant under the EU-ACP BIOPAMA Action Component focusing on management interventions for the Kiritimati Island Conservation Protected Area.

This guidance document aims to build awareness, knowledge, and capacity internationally on how to best undertake economic evaluations of tourism in protected areas, and thereby contribute towards a globally acknowledged standard methodology. We believe that it will serve as a key resource for protected area managers, site managers and their respective natural and cultural heritage agencies, practitioners, academia and consultancies, as well as international stakeholders and donor agencies.

This publication has been developed as a contribution to Phase II of the Two-phase Strategy on Protected Areas of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and prepared pursuant to various paragraphs of COP decision XIII/2 on protected areas, in particular paragraph 5(a-e), and paragraph 10 of decision XI/24.

Fijians have been at the forefront of ocean action and leadership because it i our responsibility as an oceanic people. Fiji is a nation of over 300 islands whose past, present and future are intrinsically linked to the ocean. The wealth and resources associated with Fiji's vast marine areas represent significant natural capital and are valid pillars of the country's food security. The ocean is also central to traditions, culture, its art, research and education.