Bohol's Success Story: Preserve Marine Environment
In light with the conservation of our coral reefs from my previous post, I want to share this article. Guindulman is my home town and I am proud of how our local government unit had established this so to save our marine environment there.
Article from philippines.usaid.gov:
The Bohol Sea, with 2,810 hectares of mangroves, 132 square kilometers of coral reefs rich in marine life, and eight species of cetaceans is considered one of the most important fishery and biodiversity sites in the Philippines. It is also a priority area for the conservation of mangroves, cetaceans, corals, and whale sharks; all important components of the local economy. Livelihoods from fisheries and coastal tourism depend on the richness of the Bohol Sea.
However, this rich sea, and its component ecosystems face threats from illegal and destructive fishing practices, overexploitation, and pollution from land and marine-based sources.
Local governments responded to these threats by establishing marine protected areas (MPAs). But of the 190 MPAs, many are too small, and many are poorly man-aged.
Three municipalities in southern Bohol — Duero, Guindulman, and Jagna — joined together to better utilize MPAs to protect their resources and livelihood.
These three Local Government Units (LGUs) set out to strengthen the management of their MPAs by adopting the MPA networking approach with technical assistance from USAID’s Philippine Environmental Governance Project (EcoGov) and the Provincial Government. MPA networking is a process of linking individual MPAs and marine sanctuaries based on ecological and sociopolitical inter-connectedness.
Read full article here.
And I want you to check this photos from the undersea my hometown itself, where we give great importance to the sea and it's life underneath which is the source of food and livelihood to the majority of the people living in the town.
Photos grabbed from taucher.net, a German website. Germans who loves scuba diving usually visits Bituon Beach in Guindulman and took this photos. In our town, there are a lot of marine sanctuaries where fishing or any sort of activities which will disturb the sea creatures are prohibited. There had been talks saying that they also saw some sharks and turtles on those areas because of how calm and safe the area is.
Click on the image for a better view!
xoxo,
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