Sustainable Ocean Initiative Workshop for the Philippines - Marine Spatial Planning

The Philippines is an archipelagic nation characterized by a unique and highly diverse marine environment. With approximately 13% land area and 87% marine waters, the country’s geography is fundamentally ocean-based. About 78% of provinces and 56% of cities and municipalities lie along the coast, making the well-being of our marine ecosystems closely linked to the livelihood, food security, and resilience of millions of Filipinos. Further, the country lies at the apex of the Coral Triangle, the global center of marine biodiversity, and is recognized as one of the 17 megadiverse countries in the world. Its waters host extensive coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass beds, deep-sea ecosystems, and critical habitats that support globally significant species and fishery resources.

However, the Philippines is also among the world’s most disaster-prone countries. From 1990 to 2006, climate-related events resulted in an estimated PhP 12.43 billion in annual damages to agriculture and fisheries—70.3% due to typhoons, 17.9% to droughts, and 5% to floods. For coastal communities, extreme weather events, sea-level rise, ocean warming, and increasingly unpredictable weather patterns directly reduce fishing days, undermine livelihoods, threaten food security, and impose significant safety risks.

Given these interlinkages, strengthening the country’s ocean governance, resilience, and sustainable use of marine resources is not only an environmental imperative but also a socio-economic necessity. To support this, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Philippine Department of Environment and Natural Resources, and the Coordinating Body on the Seas of East Asia are will organize a Sustainable Ocean Initiative (SOI) capacity-building workshop at the national level.

Key objectives:

• Promote the application of key concepts and good practices for sustainable fisheries, coastal resilience, and marine and coastal resource management;
• Provide a forum for dialogue and discussion among different stakeholders and sectors in the Philippines focused on sustaining national marine and coastal environment;
• Discuss various national-level priorities, objectives, challenges and gaps related to marine and coastal areas and their management in the Philippines and discuss how these relate to each other;
• Review coverage of ecologically or biologically significant marine areas (EBSAs) and other taxa-specific important areas, that can serve as a basis for a national EBSA process for the Philippines and/or as input to a future CBD regional workshop in this region to update the EBSA portfolio; PBSAP
• Identify national marine spatial planning (MSP) priorities, objectives and commitments in the context of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF).

Expected outcomes:

• Increase coherence between the Philippines’ commitments under the KMGBF and national marine and coastal policies and programs, working toward their integration;
• Enhance inter-agency and cross-sectoral coordination for integrated ocean governance and biodiversity conservation;
• Develop elements of a roadmap to inform marine spatial planning and management in the Philippines aligned with its national priorities and objectives, and contributing to the development of a national MSP (noting the Archipelagic Development Framework); and
• Identify and address capacity needs through information-sharing and discussion on MSP.