The Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) today announced the selection of organizations to lead implementation of its investment strategies for three of Asia’s biologically richest and most threatened regions.
The organizations—Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), BirdLife, and Conservation International (CI)—all have substantial experience in their particular region and a proven commitment to a partnership approach to conservation. Their selection by the CEPF Donor Council followed a widely publicized competition for the posts.
ATREE will lead the regional implementation team in the Western Ghats, which stretches 180,000 square kilometers along the southwestern coast of India. BirdLife’s Indochina Program will lead the team in the Indochina region of Indo-Burma, where the strategy focuses on two large landscapes in Cambodia, Lao P.D.R., Thailand, Vietnam and parts of southern China. CI’s Pacific Islands Program will take the lead in the remote Pacific island nations of Micronesia, tropical Polynesia, and Fiji.
Hundreds of nongovernmental and private sector groups will benefit from CEPF grants over the next five years to help implement the investment strategies after agreements are finalized with the new teams in 2008. Grant availability will be announced at a later date.
Each regional implementation team will provide leadership for CEPF at the local level and build a broad constituency of partners working across institutional and political boundaries to achieve the goals identified in the investment strategies.
The strategies are part of ecosystem profiles developed together with diverse stakeholders, a unique part of the CEPF program to create a shared approach from the outset. They focus on the highest priorities for conservation in these biodiversity hotspots, where more than 70 percent of the original natural vegetation has been lost. In Indo-Burma, only 5 percent remains.
The threat to the environment is dire for both nature and people. The Western Ghats region, for example, provides critical hydrological and watershed benefits that help sustain the livelihoods of millions of people in the peninsular Indian states who receive most of their water supply from its rivers.