Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem Project
ACCRA, 8 Feb – Member States of the Interim Guinea Current Commission (IGCC) who share the Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem (GCLME) begin a vital two-day meeting with potential development partners on 17 February, to present concrete national priority investment portfolios and initiate dialogue on forging both financial and technical partnerships for implementing their priority project plans to restore, protect and sustain marine ecosystems and resources.
The Government of Cameroon through the Ministry of Environment is hosting this seminal Conference and is pulling out all stops to ensure its success for the region.
Conference organizers expect about 60 participants and delegates to be in attendance in Douala, Cameroon from 17 to 18 February 2011. These will comprise of high representatives of IGCC member states, bilateral and multilateral development partners, private sector companies and interested non –governmental organizations
Projects to be tabled at the conference are detailed in each country’s National Action Plan (NAP). This is a set of priority programmes/projects that are in line with national legislation; policy and investment needs and are to be implemented at the country-level. Resource mobilization ( both domestic and from development partners) for these projects would advance the integrated regional management approach for the sustainable use of living and non-living resources and will result in a measureable reduction or reversal in degradation of the Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem (LME). This is the overarching strategic goal for the region which has some of the highest poverty levels in the world.
The partner’s conference is vital for the environmental, economic, social and, perhaps, political wellbeing of the GCLME countries stretching from Guinea-Bissau to Angola. The conference is the first by the GCLME, a joint project, with Global Environment Facility support, to stem the loss of living resources and halt coastal degradation of the GCLME region. The long-term goals of this ecosystem project are to recover depleted fisheries and sustain their supply; restore degraded habitats; as well as reduce, if not eradicate, land and ship-based sources of pollution that are causing environmental havoc. These challenges are being compounded by an increasing demographic shift as masses of rural folk flood coastal towns and cities across the entire region.
Faced with these challenges, the Ministers of Environment met twice in 2006 and 2010 and made far reaching decisions in both the Abuja (2006) and OSU (2010) declarations to ensure an integrated, inter-sectoral and inter-disciplinary approach to finding lasting solutions to these common transboundary deterrents to the economic development and public health of the peoples and environment of the region.
An Inter-Ministerial Committee has been set up under the IGCC/GCLME project in each country in the region to consult the private sector, non-governmental organizations and academia in drawing up a concrete and costed National Action Plan (NAP). This was done so that an integrated approach to managing marine and coastal resources of the GCLME could be adopted at the country-level. Managers of Large Marine Ecosystems are also encouraged to shift from short-term, sector-by-sector driven goals to long-term ones; and from managing commodities, to sustaining the production potential for ecosystem-wide goods and services. This form of management of Large Marine Ecosystems is a concept developed and advocated by the United States National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.
All information including the NAP reports, Strategic Action Plan (SAP) and Country Investment Profiles will be available as printed reports and posted online as a pdf documents that can be viewed at
http://igcc.gclme.org http://www.gclme.org/For more information please contact:
M. Wassouni Amadou Director of Conservation and Promotion of Natural Resources Secrétariat Général du Ministère de l’Environnement et de la Protection de la Nature Yaoundé CAMEROONTEL :2379751484
E-mail: wassouniamadou@yahoo.fr
OR
Dr. Stephen Maxwell Donkor, Executive Secretary & Regional Coordinator, Interim Guinea Current Commission/ GCLME Regional Coordination Unit Interim Guinea Current Commission/Guinea Current Large Marine Ecosystem Project UNIDO #5 Bros Tito Avenue (Block B & C), PMB CT.324, Cantonments, Accra GHANA Tel: +233-302- 781225 Fax: + 233-302-761226 Mob: + 233-20-5255570 E mail: s.donkor@gmail.com OR s.donkor@unido.orgOR
Mr. Christian SUSAN Project Manager Water Management Unit UNIDO Room No. D 1215 Vienna International Centre P.O. Box 300 1400 Vienna, Austria E-mail: c.susan@unido.org Tel.: (+43 1) 26026-3541 Fax: (+43 1) 26026-6855Interim Guinea Current Commission
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