The Asian Development Bank (ADB) has agreed financial support for a critical WorldFish-supported project to capture the ecological story of the Coral Triangle region, CT Atlas.
Environmentalists see the Coral Triangle as the global epicenter of marine biodiversity. The important region sits at a growth hub in which rapidly expanding populations, economies and trade are putting coastal and marine resources under severe and increasing strain.
The CT Atlas is one of the outcomes of the Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security (CTI-CFF), a multinational agreement to pursue multilateral and coordinated actions to safeguard the marine and coastal biological resources of the Coral Triangle. Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste are signatories to the CTI-CFF.
The CT Atlas provides information these stakeholders need to support management planning and decision-making at a regional level. Decades worth of data on fisheries, biodiversity, natural resources and socioeconomics in the Coral Triangle region had already existed, but the information needed to be aggregated at a regional scale.
CT Atlas, an online GIS database on the Coral Triangle designed to answer this need, was developed over four years by a team of experts in the US, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia.
Annick Cros, who coordinated the program from The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in Hawaii, conceived the idea with Nate Peterson, a colleague based in Brisbane, Australia.
“Nate and I were talking with a colleague from the Caribbean who told us about his project to create one database for a number of countries. We had been working on trying to get conservation data on the Coral Triangle for TNC, and we saw that this was exactly what we needed. We took it from there and started looking for funding and the right partners to work with.”
WorldFish was an obvious partner for the project as it already manages ReefBase, an online GIS for coral reefs. World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) also joined the project, which was supported by the US Government through the 5-year (2009–2013) US CTI Support Program (USCTI). TNC and WorldFish coordinated activities.
US Government funding ends in the next few months and the ADB has agreed to fund continued operation of the CT Atlas for at least two years.
More information concerning the background to CT Atlas is available here. For additional information about the CT Atlas, please contact Annick Cros (acros@TNC.org).
About WorldFish
WorldFish, a member of the CGIAR Consortium, is an international, nonprofit research organization committed to reducing poverty and hunger through fisheries and aquaculture.
About CGIAR
CGIAR is a global agriculture research partnership for a food secure future. Its science is carried out by the 15 research centers who are members of the CGIAR Consortium in collaboration with hundreds of partner organizations.
For more information or to request an interview:
contact: Toby Johnson, Senior Media Relations Manager
Mobile tel: +60 175 124 606
Email: t.johnson@cgiar.org
Web: worldfishcenter.org
Photography: flickr.com/photos/theworldfishcenter/
LINKS
CT Atlas, www.ctatlas.reefbase.org/