We are a community-focused, science-driven organization dedicated to protecting marine and coastal ecosystems in the Philippines. Through evidence-based activities such as habitat restoration, and community empowerment, we work to safeguard biodiversity while ensuring sustainable livelihoods for local communities. Our initiatives include mangrove rehabilitation, marine protected area management, and citizen science programs that engage local communities in conservation efforts. With a proven track record of impactful projects—such as restoring degraded mangroves and avoiding deforestation through collecting more than 3,000 mangrove data points to validate mangrove extent areas—we set the standard for conservation excellence. Oceanus Conservation bridges the gap between research and real-world impact by fostering collaboration with local leaders, scientists, and policymakers.
Our mission is to protect and restore coastal habitats and the surrounding wildlife to contribute to the conservation, education, and community development of the Filipino people.
We believe in sustaining biodiversity to provide ecosystem services, such as food security, for the Filipino people in the years to come.
Since the early 1900s, the Philippines has experienced a gradual decline in mangrove cover, reduced from an estimated 500,000 hectares to around 250,000 hectares today. A significant factor has been the widespread conversion of mangrove forests into fishponds, which involves clearing mangroves and constructing fishponds, further disrupting the natural habitat and affecting the coastal ecosystem. This loss resulted in negative impacts, including reduced biodiversity, reduced ecosystem services, and increased vulnerability to climate change. Efforts are now being made to revert these fishponds to mangroves. However, these restoration efforts are hindered by the challenges on land ownership, limited community awareness, inadequate science-based knowledge, and the lack of community inclusion in the creation of training and educational materials.
Our solution is the development of localized training workshops which enhances community capacity in mangrove restoration techniques, seedling propagation, monitoring, and potential economic benefits of mangrove ecosystem such as eco-tourism or selling nursery mangrove saplings to other local agencies and communities. Through these training, we believe there will be an increase in wildlife biodiversity and adaptive management because of the ongoing monitoring efforts of the community.
We also include local indigenous knowledge about mangrove conservation (e.g., medicine, food, local names, and local uses) with science-based methods in rehabilitation in developing visually engaging educational materials to guide, empower, and engage communities for long-term conservation success. These informational materials are distributed to the community members, schools, and youth organization to raise awareness of the interconnected habitat of mangroves, mudflat, seagrass and how it supports biodiversity and climate adaptation.
Through our mangrove rehabilitation efforts, we are supporting alternative livelihood of the locals by marketing and selling milkfish that are grown around the mangrove forest to a premium price. The profit after selling will go back to the conservation fund which will fuel back their monitoring efforts of mangrove conservation.
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Philippines