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“One of the most spectacular places in the Caribbean,” says John Myers, the Deputy Director of The Nature Conservancy’s Caribbean Program, “is Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park in The Bahamas. Dedicated in 1959, it was the first park of its kind in the Caribbean. And in 1985, the Bahamas took the extraordinary step of making the park a no-fishing replenishment zone, also the first one in the Caribbean. Today, a network of moorings protect the park’s coral reefs and seagrass beds so that visitors from The Bahamas and around the world can enjoy the park without damaging its ecosystems.”
At more than 100,000 acres of beaches, estuaries, blue holes, reefs and open ocean, the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park is an ambitious and ongoing undertaking. By all accounts, the park is a great success. It draws thousands of visitors each year and its healthy reefs and pristine beaches support thriving tourism-based businesses. Fish populations have improved in waters outside the no-fishing replenishment zone and the park continues to provide important habitat for endangered animals like sea turtles and Kirtland’s warblers.
Unfortunately, Exuma also suffers from a challenge that has plagued national parks ever since the creation of Yellowstone in 1872: lack of permanent, dedicated funding. Even in the United States, where national parks began, there was no source of sustainable funding for ongoing park protection and management until Congress passed the National Parks Act in 1916, when the U.S. had been a sovereign nation for more than 100 years and Yellowstone itself was more than 40 years old.
Mirages of Conservation
Today, there are national parks and other protected areas across the Caribbean, from The Bahamas to the Dominican Republic and throughout the Lesser Antilles. In fact, The Nature Conservancy’s first project in the region helped establish Morne Trois Piton National Park on Dominica in 1974. And many Caribbean parks—now approaching their 40th anniversaries—suffer from the same management and funding challenges that plague national parks everywhere, but are especially pronounced in developing regions with relatively young park systems.
Over the last decades, the international conservation community has invested heavily to create protected areas in developing countries. Unfortunately there was not enough emphasis placed on stewardship and management and in many countries, parks and protected areas remain either severely underfunded or not funded at all.
Lack of sustained financing means, among many other concerns, that there are not enough rangers to guard against poachers or enough land managers to care for the parks, manage visitation and preserve the health of the plants and animals. It also means there’s not enough funding for any expansion or changes to the park or ongoing science and research, which is more important now than ever as reefs around the world grapple with the effects of climate change.
Without dedicated, permanent funding for the creation and management of protected areas, many of the world’s parks – not just the Caribbean’s – will continue to be mirages of conservation, the so-called paper parks.
Permanent, Dedicated Funding to End Paper Parks Forever
Fortunately, the will for conservation is strong and sophisticated in the Caribbean. The leaders of countries in the region recognize that it’s not enough just to establish new parks or marine protected areas—a reef or a beach or a forest—because that’s actually only half the conservation equation. The other half, the one that makes lasting conservation possible, is permanent funding.
Without a source of dedicated, sustainable conservation finance, a park—no matter how vast or visionary, no matter how sincere and well-meaning the people who created it—is always at risk of being a park in name only.
In May of 2008, The Bahamas’ government, alongside leaders from Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines launched the Caribbean Challenge, a region-wide campaign to protect the health of the Caribbean’s lands and waters. Today, eight Caribbean nations have committed to protecting nearly 20 percent of their marine and coastal habitat by 2020.
The Caribbean Challenge will result in a wholesale transformation of countries’ national park systems and will nearly triple the amount of marine and coastal habitat currently under protection, setting aside almost 21 million acres of coral reefs, mangroves, sea grass beds and other important habitat for sea turtles, whales, sharks and other wildlife. The three core components of the Challenge include:
- creating networks of marine protected areas expanding across 21 million acres of territorial coasts and waters
- establishing protected area trust funds to generate permanent, dedicated and sustainable funding sources for the effective management, expansion and scientific monitoring of all parks and protected areas
- developing national level demonstrations projects for climate change adaptation
Modeled on other large-scale conservation financing efforts, including the Micronesia Challenge and the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia, the Caribbean Challenge goes far beyond piecemeal, incremental conservation. The campaign to meet the Caribbean Challenge is a campaign to end paper parks in the Caribbean forever.
To support the Challenge, the Conservancy has pledged $20 million in cash and in-kind resources to endow national protected area trusts and provide technical support.
Fifty Years and Counting
Because less than 7 percent of the islands and waters here are protected and managed to ensure their future survival, the coral reefs, beaches, rivers, mountains, forests and fisheries that are the foundation of all life in the Caribbean are increasingly at risk.
The plain truth: Studies indicate that without massive conservation action the corals of the Caribbean Sea could be gone in less than 50 years, and with the reefs will slowly go the life of the Caribbean.
If the Caribbean Sea is the heart of the Atlantic, then the reefs are its heart of hearts. Without the reefs giving life to the sea—the parrotfish and moray eels, the whale sharks and land crabs, the dolphins and anemones, the sea turtles and lemon sharks and bonefish and grouper—cannot survive. If the reefs die, it will be the end of life in the Caribbean as we know it and the end of countless human cultures whose histories are inextricably bound to these lands and waters.
Happily, the Challenge offers an opportunity to profoundly change that projected future of loss into a realized future of abundance. Please join us as we work to fulfill our $20 million pledge to help protect 21 million acres of the Caribbean and all of the plants, animals and people who depend upon those clear waters for survival.
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With your help, the Caribbean Challenge can make an immediate and material difference to the future of the plants, animals and people of the Caribbean. Please join us. Your contribution matters. |
Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Shona Paterson (sea turtle); Photo © Nancy Sefton (coral reef in the Caribbean)
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