The Philippines is home to one of the highest amount of Marine Protected Areas in Southeast Asia with a range of 400 to 500 MPAs of diverse regulation status. While famous marine parks or NIPAS such as Tubbataha reef are managed at a national level with the ambition to protect and enhance biodiversity, most marine protected areas are locally managed. Understanding the close relationship Filipinos have with the ocean and the dependance coastal communities have on its resources, locally-managed marine protected areas are established as a tool to both care for marine ecosystems but mostly protect and enhance food security for the people. Through regulating human activities and pressures in set areas and insuring the preservation of healthy, biodiverse key ecosystems such as coral reefs, seagrass and mangroves; they are part of a national strategy to balance the impacts of fishing practices and other human activities and ensure sustainability of the coastal resources.

Targets for MPA coverage in the Philippines have been specified in the 1998 Fisheries Code legislation, which calls for 15% of coastal municipal waters (within 15 km of the coastline) to be protected within no-take MPAs, and in the Philippine Marine Sanctuary Strategy (Areco et al 2004), which was aiming to protect 10% of coral reef area in no-take MPAs by 2020.

The effectiveness of Marine Protected Areas greatly varies per sites depending on multiple factors including the establishment of a site-specific long term management strategy and allocated resources for its execution and enforcement.

Facing the general decline of coral reefs ecosystems, preserving the marine biodiversity of the Philippines is critical.

Marine monitoring of the underwater resources is key to protecting them, creating a baseline reference of their state of health and allowing to assess priority areas and track effectiveness of conservation efforts. 

Despite being globally acclaimed and recognized for its marine biodiversity, access to updated, reliable, standardized data on the ecology, diversity, health and resilience of coral reefs in the Philippines is harder than it looks and data sparse. The archipelago is big, and technical and/or financial resources lacking in many areas.

At CRCP, we provide monitoring of the marine biodiversity of coral reefs and adjacent ecosystems in our main project areas. We are also working on providing training and supervision to build monitoring teams in other municipalities and areas of the Philippines.

We study coral reef ecology, health and resilience status, with focus on substrate composition, diversity and abundance of fish populations and benthic species. We are tracking coral health and response to stressors (such as pollution, climate change, fishing activities and other human / tourists interactions, etc.). We study resilience to those pressures and the effectiveness of conservation action in minimizing them.

Partnering with some LGUs, some of our study sites are in Marine Protected Areas, in order to assess their effectiveness, track change over time and identify possible areas of improvement needed.

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