PBS Nature
News
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15 Dec 2022
News
—
15 Dec 2022
Today at Monaco Ocean Week, our MERMAID team is celebrating the launch of the Global Fund for Coral Reefs’ (GFCR) new Monitoring and Evaluation Framework – a global set of shared indicators that will help communities, GFCR implementing partners, and countries track progress #ForCoral, including coral reef health, area of coral restoration, number of local jobs created in sustainable businesses, and commitments by the private sector to invest in women-led businesses.
Building on years of work to the latest Global Biodiversity Framework ratified in December 2022, the GFCR’s new Monitoring and Evaluation Framework is a major step toward helping countries and the private sector deliver on shared commitments to coral reefs and the coastal communities who rely on coral reefs for livelihoods, food security and coastal protection.
“The M&E Framework prioritizes key environmental, social and financial information that will be collected across dozens of GFCR countries and investment sectors to understand the results of blended finance investments for coral reef ecosystems and coastal communities” said Dr. Emily Darling, Director of Coral Reef Conservation at WCS and co-founder of MERMAID. “Practical yet robust data supported by tools like MERMAID will be crucial for measuring success of the GFCR portfolio, the most ambitious investment by the private sector in coral reefs yet.”
These data need clear workstreams. MERMAID is delighted to support the Global Fund for Coral Reefs on the delivery of practical data tools to help the GFCR standardize, aggregate, share, and report on their progress.
“Understanding our impact is key for demonstrating the success of blended finance initiatives in the marine sector and the links to the Global Biodiversity Framework,” said Yabanex Batista, Deputy Head, UN Global Team Global Fund for Coral Reefs. “With the support of MERMAID to streamline coral reef data into insights, we will be able to prioritize which investments can truly make a difference for coral reefs and support the diverse economies of coastal communities.”
“MERMAID will be a critical part of the REEF+ Accelerator Platform," says Penny Stock, UNDP Senior Technical Advisor for Ecosystems & Biodiversity. "The insights generated from these practical tools will help us understand the impact of GFCR investments to scale up capacity building, collaboration, and future investments for resilient coastal communities and coral reefs."
Currently used by over >1,000 coral reef scientists who have collected >40,000 transects across 29 countries, MERMAID will support the ‘REEF+ Accelerator’ Impact platform launched in December 2022 to drive data and knowledge for bankable coral reef solutions globally.