If 2023 ended with a flurry of activity, 2024 has started with a bang!

Some years come to a quiet end as programmes are put on hold during the monsoon season. Not so 2023!

All our teams, in their various locations, continued to be busy right to the end of the year. Ground-truthing surveys for a new remote sensing system in Semporna; capacity building for the new Redang Marine Conservation Group (RMCG); and seagrass monitoring in Johor – all continued well after the end of the usual “season” marked by the onset of the Northeast monsoon in October.

2023 saw continued progress in our various long-term conservation efforts. Our main focus is to replicate the success of the Tioman Marine Conservation Group (TMCG), and we are working to build up similar teams in Redang, Perhentian, Mersing and Semporna.

In each location, we are building capacity among local communities to participate in conservation programmes, including reef monitoring, predator control and reef rehabilitation. These efforts align strongly with the Global Biodiversity Framework, particularly targets 3, 19 and 22, which provides us with a roadmap to ensure our work remains relevant and impactful.

 Target 3, the so-called “30x30 target”, calls for 30% of marine areas to be protected by 2030. The Department of Fisheries is investigating opportunities to expand Marine Protected Areas in Peninsular Malaysia, and Sabah Parks and Sarawak Forestry Corporation are making similar efforts in those two states.

But there is a “second half” to target 3, which refers to the need to ensure protected areas are “effectively conserved and managed” through “equitably governed” systems that ensure the rights of local communities are protected. Similarly, target 22 calls for the inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) in the management of protected areas.

Taken together, we interpret these two targets to indicate that local communities should take a more central role in managing Marine Parks, and our various community-based conservation programmes are very much in line with this aspiration. Our biggest challenge is ensuring sufficient capacity among local communities to empower them to fulfil this role effectively.

Closely related to this is the second challenge we face, which is the need to transform the current approach to management to ensure that local communities – and other key stakeholders – are provided with opportunities to play a meaningful role in management through appropriate bodies.

The current management system is very “top-down”; we are trying to encourage a more flexible and inclusive approach that will meet the needs of targets 3 and 23. This could involve new approaches to management and new institutions – and should include all stakeholders, such as State governments and tourism players.

Ensuring we have sufficient funds to continue our work is always a challenge! We have been incredibly lucky to have the support of a number of large organisations in Malaysia over the years – in one case, for 10 years!

GBF target 19 could help with this. The target calls for an increase in financial resources to protect biodiversity, and we can already see early signs that international funding agencies are showing interest in investing in biodiversity conservation in Malaysia. This includes both philanthropic funding from corporations and foundations, but also the emerging field of nature-based solutions that will leverage funding through carbon and, more exciting, biodiversity credits. It’s a very new field, but we are working to understand how we might benefit from these new approaches to funding biodiversity conservation.

This fits well with our growing understanding that we can’t look at individual ecosystems in isolation. Coral reefs are just one marine ecosystem that needs to be conserved; but reefs are ecologically very closely linked to mangroves and seagrasses, the health of one affecting the health of the others. So, we are increasingly taking a more holistic view of marine resource management to include these other ecosystems in our conservation programmes.

And now we enter 2024 firing on all cylinders. Our vision remains the same: sustainably managed coral reefs in Malaysia. This year, we hope to make further progress on integrating communities into management and developing sustainable funding for long-term conservation.

We are looking forward to 2024 with quite some anticipation; join us on our journey!

As always, I would like to thank our various supporters, from funders to volunteers. We would not be able to achieve the conservation results we are seeing without a lot of support; you are what makes RCM the success it has become.