What is the issue with coral reefs? The Philippines is found within the Coral Triangle, the epicenter of marine biodiversity. Our country along with Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, and the Solomon Islands. The Philippines is home to over 500 species of stony corals. In addition, more than 2,000 marine species are associated with coral reefs! Given our abundance of these stony corals, they are not susceptible to climate change and consequently, the increasing temperature. This, in turn, affects global sea levels due to ice glaciers melting. Moreover, it affects wildlife and their habitats, and even extreme weather events...
Blue Carbon Citizen Science Training in Lobo, Batangas
Blue carbon is the carbon that is stored in mangroves and seagrass, which are blue carbon ecosystems. For this reason, mangrove and seagrass carbon storage are extremely high. These ecosystems have a great capacity to take up and store carbon in the atmosphere. What a great way to mitigate climate change! Furthermore, participating in citizen science training and projects is equally important. With this, all of us have a great contribution to the community and scientific research. Citizen Science Training BlueCARES’ network called BCnet, is organizing citizen science training as part of their blue carbon initiative. They invited Oceanus Conservation...
Mangrove Restoration in Northern Mindanao and La Union
Oceanus Conservation focuses on the blue carbon initiative and nature-based solutions as a way to mitigate climate change. Our mangrove restoration projects aim to restore and protect mangrove forests by working with local communities in the Philippines. Two of our project sites are communities in Looc, Salay, Northern Mindanao, and Aringay, La Union. Mangroves are important for these communities. These habitats protect them from intense storms and typhoons and also prevent coastal erosion. Furthermore, mangrove ecosystems also help with their own livelihood. However, there is a loss of mangrove forests in these areas due to the storm surges that recently...
New collaborations for 2022: Oceanus pairs up with non-profit partners and local communities for mangrove restoration projects
Oceanus conservation is a non-profit organization in the Philippines that focuses on advocating for the protection and restoration of blue carbon habitats. This includes mangrove forests and their surrounding wildlife. We follow nature and science-based solutions and methods for the restoration of these ecosystems. In our projects, we work with the local communities and hopefully achieve net-zero emissions. With this, we have also worked with our non-profit partners to help us achieve our goals. Non-profit partners Together with our partners, we were able to achieve these goals and create a bigger impact on our community. Currently, we have partnered with...
Ocean Literacy: Launching of Ocean Adventures with Cory Volume 2!
The Philippines is one of the mega-diverse countries in the world with high species endemism. However, there is a lack of ocean literacy and limited access to marine environmental education in most of the educational institutions around the country. In 2020, we started an initiative of creating an educational children’s storybook that tackles the lack of awareness of coastal ecosystems, focusing on the importance of coral reefs. Together with the Blue Warriors, a youth club in Zamboanguita, Negros Oriental; Alimanguan Sagip Pawikan, a community-based turtle conservation organization in Palawan; and a local village in Dapa, Siargao, we have successfully donated...
Smart Buoys to be deployed in Palawan and Mindoro
As part of our commitment to use technology to assist us in understanding the environment, one Smart Buoy each will be deployed in Palawan and Mindoro in partnership with the local government and existing NGO in the area. These Smart Buoys will be able to monitor the temperature changes in the coastal waters in the said areas so that the health of existing coral reefs can be assessed accurately. The Smart Buoy can also act as an early warning system for fisherfolk, especially in determining whether or not it is safe for them to venture out to the sea as...
Featured in World Economic Forum : Ocean literacy
The pandemic may have halted a lot of people to do most of their conservation work, however, Co-Founder Camille Rivera was still able to make use of her time by joining the Coalition Wild Program. The Coalition Wild is a 6-month intensive leadership and capacity building program to train emerging young leaders with the set of skills to carry out their proposed projects. As to Camille Rivera, she created a bilingual ocean storybook, not only in Filipino and English, but other languages in the Philippines as well. At the moment, the book has already two other Filipino languages (Chavacano and...
Mangrove restoration work with communities
The Oceanus pillars for restoration work are as follows : 1) Biophysical assessment 2) Community participation 3) Institutional support from the Local Government Unit of Salay We believe these are the essential components for meaningful restoration work. After months of assessment, discussion, and agreement with the local government of Salay, we were able to purchase 1,500 seedlings and create a mangrove seedling nursery in Misamis Oriental. We planted 550 seedlings in the months of September to November 2021. The communities of Looc and Casulog, which are part of the Municipality of Salay, helped in planting Avicennia species in their areas,...
Oceanus is featured in RESTORies!
If you are working in restoration, I bet you already heard of Restor. But to those of you who is unfamiliar of it, Restor is a science-based open data platform that connects all restoration practitioners around the world. It also features your site, what you need such as funding, volunteers and other necessities that your team needs to conduct restoration work. The most interesting about Restor is that it combines most scientific data in literature and came up with a visual platform. It shows you what species are present in your site, and how much carbon there is being stored....
Mangroves and Community : Oceanus Conservation spoke at the Side event in COP26, Glasgow, Scotland
After a 2-week long negotiations by country delegates, and side events, about 50,000 participants attended online and in-person to share solutions, ideas and build partnerships. We heard many encouraging statements such as leaders representing 90% of the world’s forests pledge to halt deforestation by 2030. EU and US and other 100 countries pledge to cut methane emissions by 2030. The private sector also showed great engagement to help finance and limit warming to 1.5 degree Celsius. These are all great promises and we look forward to local actions and translating this to financing on the ground to support small NGOs...