Taiwan Bank Funds WWF Coral Triangle Initiative In Tuna Zoneff

The protection of natural environments critical to the survival of millions of people in the Pacific will be boosted with a new financial commitment from Standard Chartered Bank (Taiwan) Limited.

Standard Chartered Bank (Taiwan) Limited, part of the global banking group operating in over 70 countries, has donated USD 350,000 to the Coral Triangle Initiative (CTI), a new multilateral partnership working to safeguard the marine and coastal resources of the Coral Triangle, the world’s centre of marine biodiversity.

The funds are to be administered by WWF’s Coral Triangle Program. The global conservation organization works with other partners in the Coral Triangle, which covers 5.4 million square kilometers of ocean across six countries in the Indo-Pacific.

Louise Heaps, Eastern Pacific Conservation Director for WWF’s South Pacific program, said the funding would help to establish a system of Marine Managed Areas in the Pacific and to conserve the Pacific’s unique biodiversity, such as threatened green, hawksbill and leatherback turtles.

“The Coral Triangle is on par with the Amazon Rainforest or the Congo Basin in terms of its importance to the planet’s biodiversity, and it is critical that we manage its natural resources properly to protect both nature and people,” she said.

“The implications of loss of habitat and natural resources are enormous particularly in the Pacific islands region, where roughly 80 per cent of the population of many of the Small Island Developing States relies entirely on the coast and coastal resources for food supply and livelihoods, and where alternative sources of income and food are limited.”

The Coral Triangle Initiative includes the countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Timor Leste, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Fiji. It is home to the highest diversity of marine life on Earth, including 75 per cent of all coral species known to science and spawning areas that are the source of 89 per cent of the global tuna catch. It supplies food and income to at least half a billion people.

WWF’s Coral Triangle Program has goals for 2020 of protecting 10 per cent of priority coral reefs in the region, zero decline in sea turtle populations from 2007 levels, and reversing the degradation of the area’s marine resources, including turtles, tuna and reef fish.

Resource depletion rates in the Coral Triangle are high and accelerating due to the explosive growth of Asian fish markets and the insatiable demand for tuna and shrimp in the US, Europe and Japan.

“Now is the time to act, before combined pressures permanently alter the region’s marine environment and the millions of livelihoods that depend upon it ...”

The leader of WWF’s Coral Triangle Program, Dr Lida Pet-Soede, applauded the vision and efforts of Standard Chartered Bank and encouraged other companies and individuals to support critical conservation efforts on the ground.

“The Coral Triangle shelters and sustains thousands of whales, dolphins, tunas, reef fish, rays, sharks and turtles, and is home to three quarters of all coral species known to science,” said Pet-Soede.

“But the Coral Triangle is also under threat. Coastal development, destructive fishing and overfishing, unsustainable tourism and climate change are taking a heavy toll and, if left unchecked, will cause the collapse of the world’s most remarkable coral reef ecosystem.”