World Wildlife Fund

The Coral Triangle - Where Man is Not the Measure of all Things by Kate Newman

The Extraordinary Coral Triangle
Sometimes the size of a solution needs to be equal to the size of the problem. In the Coral Triangle, it needs to be even bigger - in measures that go way beyond human scale.

The numbers speak for themselves: 1.6 billion acres, equal to half the size of the United States; natural habitats valued at more than US$2.4 billion annually; 75 percent of the world's coral species and 53 percent of its reefs; more than 3,000 reef fish species including commercially vital yellowfin, skipjack and bigeye tuna; and some 120 million people deriving socioeconomic benefits from the Sulu, Sulawesi and other seas.

Salmon runs filled the rivers of Labrador so full that an 18th-century witness claimed that a musket ball fired into a river could not fail to hit a fish. Alewife (a food fish of the herring family) migrating upstream from the Chesapeake Bay to spawn in Virginia were so abundant they got trampled by horse riders crossing at fords. Giant sturgeon up to 20 feet long and 1,800 pounds in weight packed estuaries and rivers of both east and west coasts of North America. So common were they in season that fishers caught them by tens and hundreds, hauling them in at the first touch of a fish against their unbaited hooks. Whales tumbled and spouted amid the waves of coast and ocean in groups of hundreds, sometimes thousands. A traveler to northern seas west of Greenland in 1585 wrote that "every day we saw whales continually."

Yet this vibrant place is being degraded by development, indiscriminate local fishing, commercial overfishing and the effects of climate change. Our vision for the Coral Triangle is to protect the natural resources of the area and create economic opportunities for the people who live here.

Crossing Political and Cultural Boundaries
WWF has been on the ground in the region for decades. This is one of many places where our work crosses the borders of several countries, as itdoes in the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Borneo and Sumatra.

This kind of conservation has become a WWF trademark. Nature knows no political boundaries and, as one of nature's leading advocates, WWF rises to the challenge, brokering multinational agreements and helping neighboring governments establish protected areas within and across their borders, on land and in the sea.

A Solution Bigger Than the Entire Region
In the Coral Triangle, WWF has helped bring together six countries - the Philippines, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste - in a multinational conservation initiative for the entire region. Across our global Network, WWF has partnered with The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, the U.S. government and many others to gain international attention, political support, and financial commitments for the initiative. For example, USAID and the State Department are providing significant funding to help the six countries during the initiative's formative stages.

On December 10, 2007, President Yudhoyono of Indonesia officially launched the Coral Triangle Initiative on Coral Reefs, Fisheries and Food Security, saying "Now is a time for action ... I am deeply committed to this initiative ... I intend to do everything in my power to ensure its success. Together, we can create a more sustainable future for the people of this region".

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