Steffen (left) and Griffin are in Kota Kinabalu for the Coral Triangle Initiative event.
KOTA KINABALU: Malaysia is making a splash with its efforts to preserve the marine biodiversity-rich Coral Triangle, earning praise for its practices in marine park management and turtle conservation.
The commendation came from the Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security (CTI-CFF), or simply Coral Triangle Initiative, of which Malaysia is a key member.
The CTI-CFF is a multilateral partnership of six countries that also include Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Timor-Leste and the Solomon Islands.
The partnership is aimed at the countries collaborating with each other to protect the Coral Triangle, home to the highest biodiversity of corals in the world, as well as addressing issues such as food security and climate change.
Solutions for Marine and Coastal Resilience in the Coral Triangle (Somacore) programme director Dr Jan H Steffen said other countries in the partnership, as well as outside of it, could learn from Malaysia how it goes about looking after its marine parks and turtles.
“In some ways, Malaysia is a role model - your parks here, especially in Sabah (such as the) Tun Mustapha Marine Park, are well-staffed (and) they are well-trained,” he told reporters at a CTI-CFF event here on Wednesday (Aug 14).
“You have a history of park management. If you see a country like the Solomon Islands, they have just gazetted the first marine protected area a few years ago, they don't have your experience.
“So, we would love to find ways to give Sabah Parks (the custodian of marine parks in the state) opportunities to share with the Solomon Islands or Timor-Leste on how they have structured their work on the parks,” Steffen said.
He added that Malaysia was also equally impressive in turtle conservation.
“When I came to Southeast Asia 30 years ago, I also worked on sea turtles and the Sabah and Malaysian governments, again, were ahead in protecting sea turtles.
“For example, carrying out head-starting for sea turtles (conservation method of raising turtles in ex-situ protected environments).
“What nobody knew at the time, not the biologists in the universities and not your colleagues from the ministries, was that the gender of these young turtles was determined by the temperature in the sand.
“So, while colleagues in Indonesia and other countries still did the same sort of head-starting, your colleagues started realising, ‘hang on a second, we might just be having only males or only females’ because the temperature in the nest,” Steffen said.
He said it was learnings like these that can make countries in the CTI-CFF, which was formed in 2009, be role models for each other.
“So, these are good examples where in different countries, governments and NGOs get different kinds of experience.
“And I think the leaders very wisely felt that the Coal Triangle Initiative could be a great platform with these kinds of learning exchanges to bring people together,” he added.
Members of the six partner nations are presently sharing their learnings at the five-day CTI-CFF event here, held in partnership with the National Coordinating Committee Malaysia, starting Aug 12.
The event is a combination of three significant programmes namely the Sulu-Sulawesi and Bismarck-Solomon Seascapes Regional Exchange; the Seascape and Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management (EAFM) Working Groups Meeting; and the Threatened Species Working Group Meeting.
CTI-CFF regional secretariat executive director Dr Frank Keith Griffin said there was a clear awareness among member nations that it was crucial to have a collective effort instead of working in silos to look after the Coral Triangle.
He said the region is home to 76% of the world’s corals, besides having almost 31% of the world’s known fish species that live in the reefs.
“It is also home to 351 million people, including 130 million who depend directly on the resources of the marine environment.
“So, it’s essential that we have protective measures in place to keep the livelihood of those people and their welfare intact by protecting the marine resources that they can actually harvest in a sustainable manner, for themselves and future generations.
“The CTI-CFF agreement signed by the leaders to protect them is based on that,” said Griffin.
Steffen said many of the problems faced by the countries were not solely their national issues.
For instance, he said that tunas, green turtles, and whale sharks attract tourists to Malaysia and are migratory species.
“If they are looked after in one country but not the next, it is very hard to manage and protect them.
“So, we were impressed to see how these six countries showed not only regional leadership but global leadership.
“The leaders of these countries realised and acknowledged that if they would not jointly start to address these challenges, all six might fail because the problems are so inter-connected,” Steffen said.
