The UK Government’s Darwin Plus funding agency recently announced funding for 31 conservation projects in the UK Overseas Territories.
The Anguilla National Trust (ANT) will be involved in three of these projects, co-leading with national and international agencies.
The ANT will work with the Agriculture Unit-Department of Natural Resources and Gender Affairs Anguilla on a project that takes a grassroots approach to understanding Anguilla’s key pollinators – birds, bats, and bees – and enhancing the habitats on which they rely. Through this project, partners are especially excited about working with interested persons, and particularly women, to establish a beekeeping cooperative for the island and the establishment of a bee product cottage industry. This project has been further supported by the European Union through an additional grant awarded to the ANT through the BEST 2.0+ funding mechanism.
The Fisheries and Marine Resources Unit-Department of Natural Resources and the ANT, in partnership with internationally-recognised Blue finance, will co-lead on another project that focuses on creating collaborative and sustainable management and financing mechanisms for Anguilla’s marine parks.
UK-based Marine Conservation Society, co-leading with the ANT and in partnership with the Fisheries and Marine Resources Unit and the University of Exeter, was also successful in securing funds to undertake Anguilla’s first ever baseline ecological surveys of Anguilla’s shark populations. The project also involves significant community engagement in an effort to better understand and address people’s perceptions about sharks and their key threats.
All of these projects build on on-going work programmes of the ANT which, as an organisation, focuses on protecting, conserving, and promoting Anguilla’s natural heritage and, more specifically, species and habitats that are particularly vulnerable. In addition to conserving Anguilla’s important biodiversity, these projects aim to build local capacity amongst local project co-leads and partners as well as national stakeholders through training and direct employment.
These three projects have been funded for three years and are set to begin in July 2021.
Darwin Plus is administered by the UK Department for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, with additional funding support from the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
– Press Release
