Caribbean Marine Protected Areas (Caribbean)

Photo credit: Jeff Yonover

The Wyss Foundation has committed up to $2,200,000 to support The Nature Conservancy’s Blue Bonds for Conservation initiative in the Caribbean. Through the Blue Bonds initiative, The Nature Conservancy will help nations simultaneously: establish permanent protection for critically endangered ecosystems; create a long-term sustainable funding stream to ensure that new protected areas are well-managed; and reduce and restructure their sovereign national debt.

The model was successfully pioneered in February 2018 in the Seychelles through an agreement that resulted in the protection of 210,000 km2 of ocean. The Wyss Foundation’s support for the Blue Bonds initiative will enable The Nature Conservancy to work with a variety of Caribbean nations to explore potential conservation opportunities, securing protections for an estimated 60,000 km2 of critical ocean ecosystems in the coming years. The Caribbean Sea contains the greatest concentration of rare and endemic marine species in the Western Hemisphere and is home to approximately ten percent of the world’s coral reefs, eighteen percent of the world’s seagrass beds, and twelve percent of the world’s mangrove forests.

As part of a new Blue Bonds deal announced November 5, 2021, Belize has committed to protecting up to thirty percent (10,113 square kilometers) of its ocean areas, including coral reefs, seagrass beds, mangroves and other important marine habitats. To support this commitment, The Nature Conservancy helped restructure approximately $550,000,000 of the nation’s external debt, leading to a lower outstanding debt balance and a longer repayment period. The result is twenty years of direct funding for conservation as well as seed funding for an endowment to sustain ongoing funding after the restructured debt has been repaid.