The Inter-American Development Bank announced the approval of a $3 million grant to Colombia for the protection, conservation, and sustainable use of important marine and coastal ecosystems and biodiversity in the archipelago of San Andrés, Old Providence and Santa Catalina, in the Caribbean Sea.
The IDB grant, funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), will help implement a management plan for the marine protected area (MPA) established on the archipelago. The management plan was carefully designed in a highly participatory process with the local communities, and it simultaneously seeks preservation of the biodiversity and long-term economic use of marine and coastal resources.
The archipelago comprises one of the most extensive marine protected areas in the Western Atlantic Ocean, known as Seaflower. With more than 2,300 square kilometers of corals, mangroves and seagrass beds, it is home to a wide variety of tropical fish, including the endangered Nassau grouper, dog tooth snapper and longsnout seahorse, as well as leatherback turtles, queen conch, spotted lobsters, and other vulnerable, threatened and endangered species.
The whole archipelago has been a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 2000, and the Government of Colombia established the 65,000-square-kilometer Seaflower MPA within the archipelago in 2005. It is the largest of its kind in the Caribbean and currently one of the 10 largest in the world.
The ecological richness of the Seaflower marine protected area is the pillar of the archipelago’s economy as well, providing food and jobs in fishing and tourism to the local communities. It also plays a role in the fishing and tourism industries at a national level.
The design of the Seaflower marine protected area, and its management plan, carefully reflect both the ecological and economic importance of the archipelago’s coastal and marine resources. It seeks preservation of its biodiversity and, at the same time, promotes sound management practices to ensure long-term, sustainable use of resources.
“Management of the Seaflower marine protected area is based on the best available biological and socioeconomic information,” said IDB project team leader Annette Killmer, “combined with strong stakeholder ownership of its management plan.”
Putting in place the elements required to sustainably manage Seaflower in the lon-term, as defined in that management plan, is a $9.2 million, 5-year long project in search of financing since the MPA’s declaration in 2005. The $3 million IDB-GEF grant announced today is part of a financial package that enables the full and very timely implementation of these elements.
An additional $1 million grant from the IDB’s Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) is in the pipeline, and the remaining $5.2 million will be provided by several Colombian organizations led by Coralina, the governmental agency for the sustainable development of the archipelago that was also pivotal in the design of the management plan.