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billion,2 underlining the significance accorded to such regions since the development of interest in hotspot identification.3
Whilst approximately 12 per cent of the global land surface is included in
the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (hereinafter: IUCN)
protected area categories, marine protected areas amount to just two and a
half per cent of the world’s maritime exclusive economic zones.4 This paucity
of coverage reflects a diverse range of factors, including the inevitable difficulties associated with justifying and enforcing restrictions on marine resource
usage in the context of rapidly growing coastal populations, particularly in
developing countries. In these circumstances, new institutional alliances and
frameworks may be required to design, enforce and monitor marine conservation programmes if they are to succeed in addressing the threats to biodiversity associated with human activity.
The Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security
(hereinafter: CTI), announced in 2009, represents one such development, with
six nations (Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the
Solomon Islands and Timor Leste) co-operating in a ten-year regional Plan of
Action covering 5.7 million km2 of waters and involving a coastal population
of around 150 million people. The conservation rationale for the CTI lies with
the unique diversity of marine life in waters shared by these countries, which
is reflected in their inclusion in three of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.
The CTI programme envisages improvements in areas including fisheries
management and marine conservation, with specific actions associated
with each goal. Fundamental to the creation of the CTI was the NGO sector,
which formed a new coalition of three major international organisations
(Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and the World Wide
Fund for Nature) in order to network with governments, secure funds and collect the necessary environmental information to justify this new international
institution reflective of their shared vision.5 This process of networking and
2 Russell A Mittermeier, Will R Turner, Frank W Larsen, Thomas M Brooks and Claude Gascon,
‘Global Biodiversity Conservation: the Critical Role of Hotspots’ in Frank E Zachos and Jan C
Habel (eds), Biodiversity Hotspots: Distribution and Protection of Conservation Priority Areas
(Springer 2011).
3 Norman Myers, Russell A Mittermeier, Cristina G Mittermeier, Gustavo AB da Fonseca and
Jennifer Kent, ‘Biodiversity Hotspots for Conservation Priorities’ (2000) 403 Nature 6772, 853.
4 Sophie Marinesque, David M Kaplan and Lynda D Rodwell, ‘Global Implementation of Marine
Protected Areas: Is the Developing World Being Left Behind?’ (2012) 36 Marine Policy 727.
5 Pedro Fidelman, Louisa Evans, Michael Fabinyi, Simon Foale, Josh Cinner and Franciska
Rosen, ‘Governing Large Scale Marine Commons: Contextual Challenges in the Coral
Triangle’ (2012) 36 Marine Policy 42.
tilburg law review 19 (2014) 81-89