The International Coral Reef Initiative (ICRI) Secretariat Moves to Philippines and Sweden

摘要

Coral reefs are the richest and most productive marine ecosystems on this planet and support the livelihoods of several hundreds of millions of people. However, these ecosystems are being lost at an alarming rate. More than one quarter of the world's reefs have been destroyed as a result of global warming and damaging anthropogenic influences such as over exploitation, eutrophication, pollution, poor land-use practices and unchecked coastal development. This situation is particularly serious in the Indian Ocean where between 50 and 95 percent of all corals have died as a result of extremely high sea temperatures during 1998. Growing fears concerning the well-being of the world's coral reefs expressed at major international for a such as the Earth Summit and the Biodiversity Convention prompted the governments of the USA, Japan, Australia, UK, France, Jamaica, Philippines and Sweden, and agencies such as the World Bank and UNEP to conceive the ICRI during the Small Island Developing States conference in 1994 and subsequently announce its formation at the First Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity in December 1994. The aim of ICRI was not to form another agency that would be plagued by bureaucracy but to provide an informal forum at which all stakeholders, including local and national governments, especially those of developing nations, international organization, donor organizations, NGOs, multilateral banks, the scientific community, and the public and private sectors could, in partnership, determine the best methods for managing coral reef resources in a sustainable manner thereby preventing further degradation of the world's reefs. With this in mind, the governments of the founding nations sponsored the first ICRI Workshop that was held in the Philippines in 1995 to identify specific priorities for action in each region of the world.