US $7.59m from GEF-6 core funds assigned to Seychelles |01 February 2016

Seychelles is set to receive a contribution of US $7.59 million from the Global Environment Facility (GEF-6) core funds for projects relating to the three focal areas: Biodiversity, Climate Change Mitigation, and Land Degradation.

The Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change hosted a national workshop for key stakeholders in the relevant sectors to review a proposed new GEF project, which is being developed for the sixth cycle of the GEF-6.

The workshop was held last week at the SFA training room.

Penny Stock from UNDP-GEF Global Technical Specialist, Ecosystems and Biodiversity and Rob Kelly, UNDP-GEF Regional Technical Advisor, CCM came to help the stakeholders in their consultation.

Formulation of the Project entitled ‘A ridge to reef approach to landscape and seascape planning and management in Seychelles’ began in February last year. The National Portfolio Formulation Exercise (NPFE), led by the Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change, brought national stakeholders together to establish the priorities for funding under GEF6.  As part of the process, two national dialogue workshops were held, in addition to technical working group meetings and individual consultations.  The resulting project represents the national consensus on addressing threats facing the ecosystems and biodiversity of the inner islands targeted by the project – provisionally Mahé, Praslin and Curieuse.

“This multi-focal project aims to address strategic issues in environmental planning for the country and it is linked to current planning processes to develop: a) a Seychelles Strategic Plan, which is land-based and largely driven by economic concerns but which envisages improved environmental management of a green corridor or spine along the mountains in the centre of the island to maintain ecosystem functions through the land and coastal zone (water resources management and LULUCF CC mitigation), and b) a Marine Spatial Plan for Seychelles, which is marine-based and driven by both government intent to establish a world-class system of marine protected areas based on LME analysis and by economic interests to maintaining sustainable fisheries,” noted the principal secretary for energy and climate change, Wills Agricole.

Andrew Grieser Johns of PCU explained that “the objective of the project is to support the operationalisation of national planning processes, linked to regional plans and international conventions, through long-term climate change mitigation, carbon sequestration, protection of biodiversity in terrestrial and coastal ecosystems, through new management regimes, capacity enhancement and innovative knowledge generation and management. Our aim is to discuss with the stakeholders if all the info we collected during the last year is correct and to formulate a project. By the end of this workshop we should have a clear consensus from stakeholders to define our actions and by 2017 we should be able to start on the agreed project.”

Roland Alcindor, project manager from UNDP, noted that some projects of GEF 4 and GEF 5 are still ongoing such as the photovoltaic projects and resource efficiency.

“We started on the resource efficiency project end of 2014 and this will allow us to remove all electronic materials that are not up to the standard from the market. It will take some more years though. The other project that is still ongoing is the outer islands project where we are looking at the management of the environment of some islands,” he said.