Elevating Excellence: How the IUCN Green List empowers Protected and Conserved Areas Actors

The Green List journey of the Western Indian Ocean Marine Protected Areas Network (WIOMPAN) professionals started in Dar-es-Salaam in November 2023, at the regional level. Until that date, only Madagascar had already formally engaged in the Green Listing process. The Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association (WIOMSA), founder of the WIOMPAN, endorsed the Green List as the international standard to promote improvement and to measure the quality of marine area-based conservation in the Western Indian Ocean MPA Network, which has seen increasing national commitments to strengthen marine protection and achieve global targets, such as the CBD Target 3 (30% of our lands, freshwater, and oceans protected by 2030).

In May 2024, IUCN in partnership with WIOMSA and the IUCN French Committee, facilitated a workshop with six Green List candidates from Madagascar and 15 pilot Marine Protected and Conserved Areas managers and representatives from Kenya, Zanzibar-Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Comoros and Seychelles, who are all engaged in the Green List journey. The different sessions were highly interactive, providing time and space for sharing knowledge and experiences on specific topics. The topics of the sessions were inspired by the site-level self-assessments against the Green List completed prior to the workshop, such as “Identify and monitor cultural values”,  “Monitoring & Evaluation systems and tools”, “Implement socio-economic assessments” or “Measure the impact of tourism in the MPA”. The objective of the workshop was to define a set of actions to overcome the gaps towards achieving the Green List, and to take the opportunity to discuss these actions in more detail with peers who have already implemented similar activities.

Lemurs, Cécile Fattebert

This important milestone was an opportunity given by the Office français de la biodiversité, Expertise France, the Agence française de Développement and the Fondation pour les Aires Protégées et la Biodiversité de Madagascar. The workshop was hosted with the support of the Ministry of the Environment and Sustainable Development, Madagascar National Parks and the Ministry of Fisheries and Blue Economy.

The exchanges were rich, and it was a milestone in the collective journey towards achieving the Green List Standard. Even though each site’s management team works on their individual pathway, they are all able to share the same reference: the Green List Standard. They all look at the same lighthouse, even though they are each taking different routes at different speeds to reach it. On the way, IUCN provides support, including connecting them to peers, mentors, or experts, to learn how to properly implement actions that they have identified as most appropriate for their context. These networking opportunities, whether in workshop settings or ad’hoc exchanges, are one of the essential capacity building areas that enable improvements. They complement the access to key resources and guidelines that aim to provide the elementary knowledge on Protected and Conserved Areas governance, planning, and management.

These types of learning exchanges are often said to be mutually beneficial. They solicit practitioners’ abilities and enthusiasm for sharing their experiences, and provide opportunities to support their peers’ journey towards effective Protected or Conserved Areas in a solutions-oriented movement.

The IUCN Green List has the power to convene Protected and Conserved Areas’ actors around a common goal and a shared framework. This framework guides decisions, design, planning, and implementation of the different steps to first reach the standard’s requirements and secondly formalise the achievements through the certification process. But at every step towards excellence, Protected and Conserved Areas management teams need insights and suggestions from the wider Green List community members. It is IUCN’s goal to co-design the modalities and enabling factors, with key partners in every region, to enable a dynamic community of actors federated around a joint collective effort to make things better.

The next steps will pave the way for mobilising technical and financial partners, WIOMPAN’s pool of mentors and global experts to support the WIO practitioners on their Green Listing journey and contribute to the regional roadmap towards 30x30. Stay tuned…