(Arlington, VA) Rare, a global conservation and development organization, announced major agreements with Indonesia and the Philippines to scale solutions for sustainable management of coastal fisheries. The waters of Indonesia and the Philippines are part of the Coral Triangle and are among the most important marine areas on the planet in terms of biodiversity and fishing livelihoods. During the recent 24th UN Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP24) in Katowice, Poland, Rare joined Indonesian Minister of National Development Planning Bambang Brodjonegoro to announce the country’s new Marine Financing Authority (MFA), one of the world’s first blended finance structures specifically designed to support marine conservation and sustainable coastal fisheries management. The mechanism will pave the way for greater public, private and philanthropic investment in coastal communities. This announcement is an example of Indonesia’s leading global role in utilizing a blended approach mobilizing private capital at the levels required to address the key issues related to the planet’s important marine and coastal resources. During the 2018 East Asia Seas Congress in Iloilo, Philippines, Rare announced an agreement with the government of the Philippines to direct resources toward helping local government units (LGUs) sustainably manage their coastal resources. The agreement will direct resources to help LGUs reach sustainable financing of their coastal fisheries resource management. Under the agreement, which was signed by Bureau of Local Government Finance Executive Director Nino Raymond B. Alvina and Rare’s Vice President for the Philippines Rocky Sanchez Tirona, the two organizations will identify and develop tools to enable resource management, mobilization and sustainable financing for the more than 800 coastal cities and municipalities across the country, as well as networks of local government units. Together, Rare and the Philippines are working toward poverty eradication, environmental conservation, and financial resilience of Filipino coastal communities. For these countries, blended finance is the strategic use of development resources from governments and philanthropy to mobilize private capital to fund national-level objectives. While investment up until now has gone primarily toward infrastructure and renewable energy, Rare is working with government partners to use blended finance as a strategy for driving investment to natural resource management, especially related to oceans and fisheries, under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 14 among others.
“The health of nations can often depend on the health of their natural resources,” said Brett Jenks, President and CEO of Rare. “Rare is advancing a blended finance strategy to support the sustainable management of natural resources by demonstrating their value as a natural asset, and then bringing public, private, and philanthropic partners together to invest in their health over the long term. This is an innovative way of scaling the success we have seen at the community level across an entire nation.” “Partnerships are needed among development banks, governments and philanthropies to mobilize resources from commercial partners to reach the most marginalized and disenfranchised, and provide them with access to needed capital,” said Valeria Ramundo Orlando, Rare’s VP for Blended Finance. “The MFA will provide a financial mechanism to reduce risk for institutional investors to participate with governments and philanthropy in creating sustainable coastal communities.”
ABOUT RARE
A 4-star Charity Navigator-ranked NGO, Rare is a leader in using behavior change to achieve conservation goals globally. Rare inspires people to take pride in the natural resources that make their communities unique, while also introducing practical alternatives to environmentally destructive practices. Rare has trained more than 350 community leaders and government employees in 56 countries in campaign planning and social marketing, equipping them to deliver community-based solutions based on natural and social science, while leveraging policy and market forces to accelerate positive environmental change. Rare then works to scale that impact to help deliver the same kind of change around the globe. Learn more at rare.org and on Twitter at @Rare_org.