The “Building Capacity for Coral Reef and Human Dimensions Monitoring within the Wider Caribbean” projects consist in a series of training workshops funded by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation (NFWF) whose goal is to reinforce the capacities of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) managers in the Wider Caribbean Region.
More precisely, these workshops aim to train MPA managers and other stakeholders in coral reef monitoring methodology recommended by the GCRMN-Caribbean, a series of methods that integrate both bio-physical and socio-economic data. After the workshops, participants put in practice the acquired knowledge by making bio-physical and socio-economic site assessments in each of the selected MPAs for each participating country, thus contributing to the pool of data on Caribbean coral reefs.
GCRMN-Caribbean training workshops have been held in Jamaica in 2017 and in Saint-Martin in 2018. The participants of the former came mostly from Jamaica, whereas those from the latter came from 5 Caribbean insular territories : Saint-Martin, Sint Maarten, Saint-Barthélemy, Sint Eustatius and Saba.
Two new workshops will allow to impart training to acteors from Honduras, Guatemala, Belize and Mexico, countries composing the Mesoamerican Reef Region. First, a workshop entirely dedicated to socio-economic dimension og the GCRMN-Caribbean guidelines will be held from December 9th to 13th in Roatan, Honduras. Then, in 2020, a second workshop at Calabash Cay, Belize, will be dedicated to the bio-physical axis of these methods.
Finally, to increase the promotion of this integrated monitoring, the monitoring process and the results will be regionally documented by local organisations and institutions, as well as internationally by the GCRMN-Caribbean, to improve and guide decision making for the conservation of coral reefs in the Caribbean.
