Chloe Victoria Harvey
Other projects
24 Oct 2016
Uniting Governments and Tourism Businesses for Marine Conservation across the Coral Triangle through the Green Fins Approach
This project aims to effect change within the diving industry and among local communities through the implementation of the Green Fins approach, a tool for supporting adoption and implementation of best practice for the protection of coral reefs.
White Beach Clean-up.
Tourism drives considerable economic growth. Coastal tourism is particularly important in the Asia Pacific as numerous attractive and rapidly developing beach and coral reef destinations are located throughout this region.
Tourism can act as a significant local driver of coral degradation, exerting pressures on the ecosystem through direct and indirect impacts associated with developing infrastructure as well as other activities. Today, scuba diving and snorkelling are highly accessible activities, enjoyed by a mass audience. Every year, one million new divers, with very limited knowledge of the fragility of the environment, come into contact with coral reefs. Intensive scuba diving and boating can directly damage corals reducing live cover and making them susceptible to other stresses. Significant diver damage is often observed on frequently dived reefs. As a result, beach and reef tourism currently poses an increasing threat to the natural ecosystem from which it has grown.
The environmental impact of these activities needs to be controlled through the provision of environmental standards. The Reef-World Foundation (RWF) has responded to this by providing training, technical advice and support to enable governments, with the support of local communities, to manage a sustainable diving and snorkelling industry through the Green Fins approach.
Green Fins is a public private partnership for environmental stewardship in the reef tourism industry, focusing on diving and snorkelling. The approach encompasses three main elements: certification of dive centre operations based on a code of conduct and a robust assessment system; support towards revising and where necessary strengthening regulatory frameworks; and strategic outreach to diving and snorkelling operators and their customers. Green Fins was developed by UNEP and The Reef- World Foundation in 2004 and has to date been introduced to major diving destinations in SE Asia with noted success.
The overall objective of this project is to enable RWF to build on the successes achieved from past RSGF support by continuing to support sustainable national project development and expansion in the Philippines and Malaysia and to investigate the possibility of introducing the approach in Indonesia.