Ecotourism is often presented as the savior for wildlife and wild places — providing local communities with financial incentives to preserve nature while also reducing poaching and development pressure.

But, lately, others question whether rich Westerners jetting around the world really help much at all: They disturb animals, create demands for new development and only employ local people in low paying jobs.

Some conservationists even consider tourism to be a significant threat to natural areas.

Which view is correct? Is ecotourism a problem, or a solution?

My biases up front: I’d rather travel for the purpose of seeing wildlife and enjoying various outdoor activities than just about anything. My wife has remarked it’s my drug of choice.

That aside, I still think the issue of ecotourism defies easy answers. Problem or solution?

It depends.

Certainly, the ecological havoc wreaked by tourists in places like the Galapagos is well documented. A fragile ecosystem, animals unafraid of humans and an increasing number of cruise ships has been a recipe for disaster.

One doesn’t have to look hard to see tourists behaving badly in nature.

People harass and feed wild bison, leave trash strewn across the Himalayas, demand resorts in places they shouldn’t be — the list is long.

And then there’s the whole carbon footprint issue. We all know that flying has tremendous impacts, so can we really justify flying off to some far-off corner of the world to see animals or scenery?

These are important concerns. Without a doubt, ecotourism can be a threat. But is it always?

After all, would there even be a Galapagos left as we know it if it wasn’t for tourism? Really?

Consider other island ecosystems and how difficult it is to conserve native island wildlife. If it wasn’t for those tour boats, the Galapagos would likely be a highly developed, rat-infested island devoid of wildlife.

Yellowstone may at times be crowded with tourists behaving badly, but would there still be herds of bison and packs of wolves and grizzly bears without those tourists?

The Serengeti faces issues, to be sure, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the wildebeest population there continues to migrate, during a period of time when so many other large mammal migrations have disappeared.

Private ranches in places like Brazil’s Pantanal and Namibia still have large populations of wildlife, in part because many ranchers here now attract tourists. It seems naïve to expect that they will keep conserving wildlife if visitors quit showing up.

Ecotourism, ultimately, is a complicated issue. And in that way, it’s not so different from most other conservation issues.

Some conservationists have the tendency to declare activities as simply “good” or “bad” — whether it’s ecotourism, ranching, timber harvest, invasive species, hunting, fire, or agriculture. All have their proponents and detractors.

However, we should make decisions based on the reality of our world, not on utopian fantasies where humans no longer have any impacts on nature.

We can work to make sure that ecotourism is done in appropriate ways that benefit wildlife and local communities.

And as the saying goes, conservationists can’t “let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

Ecotourism isn’t perfect.

In many cases, though, it’s the best solution we have.

(Photo: Caimans draw tourists to Brazil’s Pantanal. Credit: Matt Miller/TNC.)

It’s indeed a bright green morning today, with positive news everywhere: International Climate Day of Action a big success! Smart meters galore! And here’s the big news: a new study shows your personal actions can make a difference in the fight against climate change! Take that, all you climate change pessimists.

1. Bill McKibben says we need to “stop whining and man up” to the fact that we can fight climate change. Grist chatted with him about 350’s International Day of Climate Action on October 24 (see video above), which included thousands of events around the world. Did you participate?
2. If you don’t already have a smart meter in your home, now’s your chance to get one — a government grant for $3.4 billion will install 18 million smart meters into houses across the United States to help improve energy efficiency.
3. And just in case you’re thinking that a smart meter won’t make much of a dent in climate change, a new study found that 33 simple household improvements could reduce national carbon emissions by 7 percent –enough to offset emissions from the petroleum, iron, steel and aluminum industries combined.
4. Can conservationists save the world? It’s the vision and hope of Nature Conservancy President and CEO Mark Tercek. Read a Reuters interview with Tercek about using market forces to protect nature – and how conservation is in everyone’s economic interest.  
5. Scientists have a new tool in the battle to save frogs from a deadly fungus that’s killing them all over the world: a highly-technical protocol for detecting the fungus in frogs is now available online, making it possible for scientists everywhere to have the information they need.

Boys fishing the Zambezi River behind a crocodile barrier

How do you convince people that a river they’ve known their whole lives is not the river it once was…or could be?

That turned out to be my challenge last week, when I traveled to Zambia in support of The Nature Conservancy’s new project to restore the Zambezi River.  After several days of meetings with our partners — including WWF and universities and government agencies from Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique — I finally got to spend some time on the river itself, in Lower Zambezi National Park.

This was my first experience in an African wilderness, and I was awestruck by the sheer abundance of hippos and crocs and the throngs of elephants, buffalo, antelope and baboons brought to the river’s edge by the blazing heat and parched hills that marked the end of Zambia’s long dry season (see below for a slideshow of the river, dam and wildlife).

While the wildlife had left me with a childlike sense of wonder, it was our dinner companion that night that brought home for me the importance and challenge of this project.

We sat down to dinner amidst a throbbing insect soundtrack, a slow-burning fire glowing in the foreground with the Zambezi a sinuous darker void in the darkness beyond. Joining us was Kevin, a Zambian who manages the lodge where we were staying.  Conversation turned to the health of the river and he told us the majority of his guests were anglers lured by the aptly named tiger fish, a fearsome predator with teeth right off the costume rack of a B-horror movie.

Kevin mentioned that fish numbers were down and had been going down for a while. This seemed a natural opening to talk about one of the specific objectives of our Zambezi project: working with dam managers to improve how they release water from the massive upstream Kariba Dam (called “environmental flow releases”), in part to promote the productivity of fish in this part of the river.

My Conservancy colleague suggested this: “You know,” he said, “some people think the fish decline is because the river no longer has high water during the rainy season because how the dam is operated.”

Kevin, nothing if not blunt, shook his head and said: “Nah, that’s crap. The real reason is that people in the villages take too many fish — they use nets with a small mesh that catch everything in the river, even the smallest fish. That’s why the fish numbers are going down.  But what can you do? You can’t simply tell people not to fish, they have nothing else. What will they do then, come and rob you at night?” He went on to relate his skepticism that the operation of Kariba Dam should, or even could, be altered; it just seemed risky to him.

In this one riposte, Kevin succinctly framed both the need and challenges for the Zambezi project.

First, although the river appears healthy — its water is clean and its banks are wild and rich in wildlife — appearances can be deceiving.  The river is not healthy, or at least not the same healthy it once was. Kariba Dam — big enough to store every drop of water flowing in the river for two years — has tamed it, made it a different river. Before the dam, the river ran high during the rainy season and very low in the dry. Today, the big reservoir behind Kariba captures the floods and evens out the flows throughout the year

Though we don’t have fisheries data from before Kariba, if the Zambezi is like most other big rivers, much of its fish abundance would have been produced in the floodplain grasslands and wetlands when they were inundated by high flows. Now the Zambezi mostly stays in its banks.

Second, the challenges for conservation and of people are intertwined. Overfishing is hurting the Zambezi and, ultimately, the people that depend upon it. The people who live here need some combination of better fisheries management, alternative sources of income and protein, and more fish in the river (one of the goals of the environmental-flows project). These livelihood challenges are inextricably linked with nature conservation and restoration.

Finally, even potential beneficiaries of changes can be skeptical of deviations from the status quo, because the risk of disruption looms larger than the as-yet-unproven possibility of benefits. Thus, the benefits must be clearly analyzed, demonstrated, and communicated.

Kevin’s conviction that overfishing, not flow regime, is the cause of fish decline is partly right — it is a problem for the river as it is today, this river. But this river is different from the river it once was. It’s not surprising that Kevin doesn’t suspect the flow regime; the current river is the only river he’s ever known.  Kariba was built in 1955, and so the only people who can really remember how the river previously worked — let’s say those at least 12 years old then — are nearly 70 years old today.  For everyone else, this river is the river.  And this Zambezi is being overfished.  But perhaps some aspects of the old Zambezi can be restored.

It’s clear we need good communications tools.  If Kevin — who has much to gain from a new flow regime — was skeptical of changes to the river’s management, what would other people say?

Fortunately, we got some practice at that communication later in the conversation. Kevin mentioned that the anglers know they need to fish near the river’s edges, where it flows next to or through downed logs, grasses and other vegetation. “Not out in the middle of the river,” he said. “The water’s too fast and the fish don’t like it. The fish are along the edges.”

I explained that what we talked about before — environmental flows to restore the connection between river and floodplain — was really the same thing as creating lots and lots of such “edge” habitat. Rather than just being restricted to the sides of the river, the shallow, calm, and vegetated “edge” habitat would cover an extensive plain — the difference between grazing cows in a strip of grass along a highway versus a vast meadow.

Kevin nodded his head thoughtfully.  I don’t know if he was convinced, but we’d found some common understanding and vocabulary of how the river worked.  We have much work ahead of us.

(Photo credit: Jeff Opperman/TNC.)

Kids love the ecosystem services provided by rivers.

I was tucking my five-year-old daughter into bed and, as kids tend to do, she launched into a series of questions  — part curiosity, part stalling tactic. Her topic that night was employment, and she asked why various people did what they did, such as: “Why is Aunt Amy a doctor?”

I mustered a response and then added: “You know, Daddy’s a doctor too,” with a tongue-in-cheek tone — presumably lost on her — that acknowledged Americans’ different perceptions of M.D.’s and Ph.D.’s.

The difference evidently was not lost on her. She responded: “Yeah, but you’re not the kind of doctor that makes people feel better.”

Ouch. An unexpected reminder of how some occupations are widely regarded as helping people, while the value of my job — conservation of rivers — is not always obvious. In fact, I’m sure my daughter isn’t my only family member who doesn’t really “get” what I do.

Which isn’t just a problem for me. It’s a problem for conservation.

And it’s not just those who share my genes. I’m reminded of a decade-old interaction while I was in graduate school.  Out in a San Francisco bar one night, I found myself talking to a very pretty woman.  Searching for a way to describe what I did (and sensing that ‘riparian ecologist’ — and one just in training, no less — might somehow fail to impress) I seized upon a recent Congressional authorization to restore watersheds that support salmon.  If Congress devoted $50 million to what I do, I reasoned, it must signal some sort of importance.

When I told her about the Congressional appropriation, she clutched her stomach as if she’d been hit. “Doesn’t that make you sick?” she said.  Hmm, not quite the reaction I was looking for, unless perhaps she thinks that’s an insultingly paltry sum for such important work. She finished her thought: “I mean, just think of what that money could do for education or sick children.”

People: 1; Salmon (and my prospects): 0.

I wish I’d had a snappy reply such as, “Would you rather that $50 million go for a quarter-mile of a new four-lane highway” (reflecting the staggering per-mile cost of many highway projects), but a beauty contest between all the ways our society chooses to spend money isn’t really the point. A better response would have been to explain that, in California alone, the annual economic value of the salmon fishery — a mere remnant of its historic might — can be measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Investing in healthy, functioning ecosystems often supports people’s livelihoods and grows the economy.

These two conversations are instructive.  As many writers for Cool Green Science have pointed out, conservationists must do a better job describing the linkages between their work and the well-being of people. This linkage is a theme that I’ll try to weave throughout my postings on this new blog, which will focus on water and the conservation of freshwater ecosystems. Rivers, lakes and wetlands provide some of the most impressive examples of how healthy ecosystems provide direct benefit to society.

For example, the Mekong River supports the largest freshwater fishery in the world, valued in the billions of dollars annually and providing the primary source of protein for 60-70 million people in Southeast Asia. What makes this crucial harvest possible? The fact that the Mekong is a relatively healthy, free-flowing river. Fish can migrate long distances to spawning habitats and, every year, the monsoon rains inundate vast  — and phenomenally productive — floodplains along the river. This incredible environmental, economic, and cultural resource is now threatened with plans to build 11 large hydropower dams on the Mekong, and fish biologists say that there is no way the fishery can be maintained if those dams are built.

While conservationists should emphasize these economic values of healthy ecosystems, this concept — that conservation and the well-being of people go hand in hand — must not rely only on dollars-and-cents comparisons. That may work for the Mekong or California’s salmon fishery, but nature’s values are myriad and at times difficult to capture with traditional economics. Conservationists shouldn’t apologize for advocating vigorously for those cultural, spiritual and aesthetic values.

Expecting nature to always pay its way, in a strict sense, would be no different than suggesting that the National Gallery should sell its most valued paintings to private collectors because the most economically efficient use of those hundreds of millions of dollars would be to reinvest them in health care or education.

While jobs and dollars are important, beauty, serenity and inspiration are also essential to our well-being. From jobs to clean water to joy and reverence, there are many ways that the conservation of nature makes us feel better.

Even if people still don’t “get” what I do.

(Image credit: Jeff Opperman/TNC.)

There is a growing demand from science, from policy and from conservation itself to include people in conservation.

In the meantime, conservationists are still trying to figure out how to best conserve habitats and species and now how to do this with climate change. Now we’re piling on people, too?

But I would argue that thinking people — both how nature serves people but also how to invest in people to better serve nature — can make everything simpler for conservation. At the end of the day, nature and people have the same economic bottom line: survival.  So why can’t we speak in one currency?

We need that universal currency, and not necessarily in the form of a price tag for the services that nature provides — like clean water and clean air.

We need to rethink the way we talk about “value” in all senses: economic, environmental or otherwise.  As historian Eric Zency articulated in a recent New York Times opinion piece:

…this [economic] downturn offers an excellent opportunity to get rid of…gross domestic product [G.D.P.]…a deeply foolish indicator of how the economy is doing.

Zency describes multiple things wrong with the indicator, but the most salient for conservation being that generally G.D.P doesn’t reflect real and complete costs and benefits. Burn fossil fuels by using electricity to dry your clothes and up goes G.D.P. But if you air dry them, conserve our natural capital (i.e. our air), and ultimately enhance our planet’s sustainability…there is no change in G.D.P.

Conservation scientists can help with this problem perhaps not by actually getting rid of G.D.P., but rather by providing the food to fuel the integration of nature’s value in this index.  The problem is: We don’t. Instead, as Thomas Friedman discusses in a recent Times column:

We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems…separately.  The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors.

So, how to value what ecosystems do for us in a way that’s objective, not subjective? I don’t think this value needs to be a marketable dollar value, at least not right away. The first step is to work backwards: Figure out the origins of what people value about nature.

For instance: Water “comes” from a tap. But really, it might come from an aquifer partially fed by surface water streams that come from the snow pack on a mountain range hundreds of miles away. Melt the snow pack or degrade the mountain vegetation so the soils no longer soak the water into the aquifer and suddenly we have no water in our taps — whether we are poor or rich.

So there is value in that snow pack and in that vegetation and in those soils. Admittedly, no one knows exactly how much value and what it’s “worth.” But I don’t think we need an exact measure to integrate the value into our economic accounting systems.

The Nature Conservancy’s water fund projects in Quito and elsewhere in Latin America are a good example of approximating such value. Water utilities need clean water for their clients (often urban residents). Hydropower companies need water free of sediments to generate power. So instead of paying for water treatment plants and for dredging equipment, why not invest that money in the protection and restoration of the watershed where the water comes from? Invest it in people and in nature.

These projects do just that — and in so doing, a market is created and a non-subjective value attached. Water funds make it one conversation. It’s not simple, but it’s possible. And the sooner people, banks, poverty, climate, animals, water, fish, birds, cities, fungi and bats all enter the same picture, the sooner we can find more solutions to a set of problems that are inextricably linked.

(Image: Maria Aigaje (on right) with her daughter Adelaida (center) and son, Saul prepare beans at their home in the traditional Quechua community of Oyacachi, which lies within Ecuador’s Condor Bioreserve. The community of Oyacachi has benefited from funds generated by a sustainable water fund in Quito. Adelaida has organized a youth group to do reforestation work. “They’re helping to replant 7,000 polylepis trees. They’re teaching all of us how to care for nature,” stated her mother. Credit: Bridget Besaw.)

I am guessing that few if any people reading this would picture people when they think about an ecosystem. I know when I think ecosystems, I think plants, animals, rivers, etc., but not people.

Ecosystems are about nature. People aren’t nature, right?

But, by definition, there is nothing that excludes people from being part of an ecosystem. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, ecosystems are “a biological community of interacting organisms and their physical environment.” Guess what? People are organisms. We are also a biological community. Ecosystems inevitably include both natural resources and the people that use them, depend on them and extract them.

Nevertheless, in climate change discussions (and, let’s face it, most conversations and news about nature are about climate change these days), there are two conversations:

1. Helping nature (i.e. ecosystems) adapt to climate change through investments in natural systems to ensure their resilience — otherwise known as Ecosystem-Based Adaptation (EBA).
2. Helping people adapt to climate change.

And this dichotomy is why adaptation to climate change really hasn’t caught on as a concept that’s moving environmental policy — not to mention people and their investment in “nature.”

The scientific literature on these topics is what really made me aware of this dichotomy:

• Some are all about EBA — creating resistant and resilient systems that can respond to climate change.
• Some are all about people adapting to climate change (right down to titles such as “Lifting the Taboo on Adaptation“).
• And while some try to bring the conversations together, they still don’t talk about investments in people AND in land as a means to adapt to climate change.

Conversations about ecosystem services — the services nature provides us, like water filtration or fisheries — get us closer, too, when they include the benefits of EBA for people. But conservationists need to talk about people as part of an ecosystem, or better yet, as part of nature — not just people benefiting from some entity outside themselves known as “nature.”

People depend on natural resources. But resource extraction tends to alter native vegetation and systems — so, as our population continues to grow and climate change shifts resource availability, we are going to extract more from new areas. This ever-roaming extractive behavior can threaten invaluable biodiversity…not to mention our quest for sustainable livelihoods.

So yes, EBA needs to be in climate change policy. It also needs to factor into on-the-ground conservation efforts. But it won’t succeed if the investments we’re advocating to help ecosystems adapt don’t also include investments to provide for human well-being directly. Conservation organizations might not be the best equipped to invest in people, but if we at least define ecosystems as including people, we can more effectively partner with those who can make such investments.

Now, while we still have the time, let’s do more than just invest in nature or protected areas or native systems. Let’s also invest in:

• Best management practices on productive systems (such as riparian buffers, contour farming, organic agriculture, among others);
• Education to teach the importance of native systems for the long-term sustainability of resource availability (example: Quito, Ecuador, where as part of the Quito water fund, a project The Nature Conservancy helped spearhead, children in city schools are taken on field trips to understand the source of their water and the role conservation plays in its distribution); and
• Alternative livelihoods for people, making them less dependent on any one resource.

Sound impossible? Think about marine protected areas — which provide a sustainable fish harvest to people or regions where we’ve also invested in providing people with other income options, thereby decreasing pressure on non-human systems and resources while securing livelihoods and protecting biodiversity. Marine protected areas are a perfect example of why EBA must be about human AND non-human systems — because conservation works better if you consider both.

If you still need convincing, then read “An Amazon Culture Withers as Food Dries Up,” a powerful, poignant recent story in The New York Times, depicting just how people suffer “along with the animals” as their fisheries resources dwindle away because of deforestation and climate change.

From the Arctic to the Amazon to the Maldives, indigenous peoples who rely on nature’s cycles are suffering because of climate change — and serve as a warning to us all.

(Image: Farming landscapes in the Ecuadorian countryside in the Paute watershed with a protected area in the background. Credit: Rebecca Goldman/TNC.)

The Amtrak train sits idle in the station, as the passengers alternately make cell phone calls from the platform or drink warm beer from their seats. There’s a gas leak ahead along the tracks in Baltimore, and the whole Northeast rail corridor is shut down.

Coming on the heels of the June crash in the Washington Metro that left nine dead, and the 2007 collapse of a major bridge in Minneapolis, it feels like the American city is tumbling apart.

America’s grey infrastructure — the pipes and wires and rails and roads that make our cities work — is in crisis. The American Society of Civil Engineers in a recent report gave our infrastructure a D grade, pointing out that there hasn’t been adequate maintenance in more than a quarter-century. At some point, Americans accepted the notion that government was too broke or too incompetent to maintain our grey infrastructure, and government has fulfilled our low expectations.

This feels odd to me though, because during my visit to New York City I saw some new shoots of “green infrastructure.”

• An old abandoned elevated train track in an industrial neighborhood has become the High Line, a stylish open-air park extending through the city.
• Times Square is now closed to traffic, creating a pedestrian walk along Broadway that might someday (with some more work) challenge Las Ramblas in Barcelona for the title of world’s greatest pedestrian street.

Of more interest to conservation biologists than such urban parks is the exponential growth of the land trust movement in the past decade in the United States, and the recent glimmers of hope that our country will begin to address its impact on global climate.

Despite this optimism — and The Nature Conservancy is by collective and individual personality an optimistic place — a realistic review of history suggests that most of America’s green infrastructure, the services we obtain from nature and deem important enough to safeguard, was protected in the 1960s and 1970s. A series of landmark bills in those decades such as the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act made our green infrastructure the envy of the world.

One could argue that since then major environmental gains have been outweighed by losses, and our green infrastructure has slowly crumbled.

The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that it will take upwards of $2.2 trillion over just the next 5 years to keep up with the cracks in our grey infrastructure. That works out to more than $7,000 per person, a shockingly big figure.

But I don’t think society even knows the equivalent figure for green infrastructure to an order of magnitude. If one includes climate change as a threat to green infrastructure, it appears adaptation costs over the next several decades to deal with climate change already in the pipeline might be of the same order of magnitude.

I’m convinced Americans will find the money and the willpower to repair our grey infrastructure, once a few more disasters shake us into action. I’m not so optimistic about our green infrastructure, and worry it will be overlooked in the wake of grey infrastructure crises.

(Image: The High Line in Manhattan. Credit: Ed Yourdon through a Creative Commons license.)

Trevor Sandwith — our team lead on adaptation at the ongoing international climate change discussions in Bonn — has penned a blog post on Grist.org about a concept gaining momentum here called an ecosystem-based approach to adaptation. He says:

It comes down to one basic principle everyone seems to agree on: ensuring that the world’s natural resources are healthy and strong enough to survive the impact of climate change and can continue to provide the food, water, shelter and income we all rely upon for survival.

While there may be times when hard infrastructure is necessary, the expert group said that ecosystem-based adaptation is often more cost effective and more accessible to rural and poor communities than man-made infrastructure and engineering.

Unlike sea walls and levees, the experts said, using natural resources to combat climate impacts has the added benefits of supporting economies, promoting biodiversity, maintaining food and water supplies and providing other services such as eco-tourism and productive fisheries that contribute to sustainable livelihoods.

Ecosystem-based adaptation harnesses the power of nature to help human communities adapt to climate change. Strategies can include such things as protecting mangroves to shield communities and infrastructure against storm surges, ensuring forest systems stay healthy to provide clean drinking water or connecting fragmented lands to allow plants and animals to migrate away from areas impacted by climate change. These services provided free by nature would be extremely costly to replace, even if it were possible to do so.

Go to Grist to find out how conservation, restoration and management of our natural resources can help vulnerable communities face climate change. Or read more about the Nature Conservancy’s work on adaptation.

(Image: Mangrove knees. Credit: Ami Vitale.)

Friday’s emails here at the Conservancy were swirling with excitement about what some have called “one of the most important conservation advances of all time” — the Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries, and Food Security (CTI).

And I have to agree with that enthusiastic assessment. When have we ever heard of six governments — entire countries — coming together to ensure the long-term sustainability of their natural resources? I posted last week in anticipation of these events, which included an agreement that may turn the tide toward global awareness and action for our oceans and coasts.

Here’s a closer look at the CTI agreement from Lynne Hale, director of our global marine program, who has been in Manado, Indonesia at the World Ocean Congress and the Coral Triangle Initiative Summit, representing The Nature Conservancy along with Roger Milliken, Jr., chairman of the Conservancy’s board of directors (pictured above with President Yudhoyono of Indonesia):

Four days, 2000 people, hundreds of scientific talks, multiple workshops, and an exposition like a World’s Fair — attended, it seemed, by the entire city’s inhabitants. Add a gala dinner on Thursday night hosted by President Yudhoyono of Indonesia that started with dancers from Minahasa, Bali and Aceh and ended with dramatic fireworks. But all of this was only a prelude to Friday’s main event.

After obtaining three different identification tags and going though the same number of security checks, I was privileged to witness one of the largest commitments ever made to marine conservation. At the Coral Triangle Initiative Leaders’ meeting the heads of state of Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, East Timor, Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea formally launched the Coral Triangle Initiative for Coral Reefs, Food Security and Fisheries. They adopted a Regional Plan of Action that contains unprecedented commitments to better manage existing marine protected areas (MPAs) and set bold targets for establishing new ones. They committed to transform the management of their fisheries and to take aggressive and coordinated action on climate change.

For someone like me, who began working in marine conservation in the 1970s when ocean and coastal issues rarely made it on to the political agenda, hearing six heads of state explicitly recognize the centrality of healthy marine ecosystems to the well-being of their citizens is both amazing and satisfying. But of much greater consequence is that that they are taking concrete actions to turn rhetoric into action.

Just a few examples…

• The six governments committed over $13 million in new funding for implementing the plan;
• Indonesia declared the largest MPA in the Coral Triangle, the Savu Sea (3.5 million hectares), achieving its target to decree 10 million hectares of MPAs by 2010, and setting a new goal of 20 million hectares by 2020.

Inspired by these countries’ commitments and solidarity, an alphabet soup of partners ranging from the Conservancy to the Asian Development Bank to USAID committed to provide resources and work together to support the CTI.

So…I leave Manado, exhausted and exhilarated; and yes, reality begins to slip in. The road ahead is filled with many challenges. But it’s time to get back to work and take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to leverage the scale, scope and impact of marine conservation so that the magnificent Coral Triangle remains so for generations to come.

(Image: Conservancy Board of Directors Chair Roger Milliken, Jr. (left) and President Yudhoyono of Indonesia. Credit: TNC.)

We know there’s a lot of news out there to stay on top of every day. That’s why we’ve done the work for you — and condensed it into the top five green news stories of the day:

• Feel the Squeeze: Check out this video of CNN reporter John Zarrrella learning how to catch a Burmese python — an invasive pet that’s taking over the Florida Keys. The Nature Conservancy is trying to stop them with a new initiative called the “Python Patrol.”
• Show Me the Money: The U.S. Department of Energy has released a map of every state and city  eligible to receive stimulus funding for energy efficiency. My home town will be getting $162,000 — how about yours?
• Who Needs Dishware Anyway? Try Your Hands: Many states are banning dishwashing detergent that contains phosphates to help protect rivers and fish, but not everyone is happy about it. Apparently, phosphate-free soap doesn’t get your dishes very clean.
• Green Skies: Doom and gloom got you down? Here are five reasons why the current economic situation won’t derail the movement toward a greener energy future. 
• Another Argument for Carbon Markets: A new study finds that trees are still less valuable than the land they stand on, despite efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD).