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IOCS research affiliate and former PhD student Dr. John Bohorquez is making a global impression in the field of Marine Protected Area Finance


Dr. John Bohorquez has had a busy 2024, taking on several new projects with the United Nations, NGOs, and with Stony Brook!

 

After resigning from his post at The Ocean Foundation in partnership with the International Fisheries Program at the Pew Charitable Trusts, John began working with Minderoo Foundation on a five-month project in partnership with the Blue Nature Alliance.  He applied his expertise on MPA finance to develop principles and guidance for practitioners and policy makers on financing MPA networks that protect 30% of country’s EEZ, or Marine 30x30 Finance.  The work culminated in a whitepaper publication on the 30x30 finance principles and a practitioners guidance document that is still in development. 


John presented this work at part of a panel he led at the 2024 RedLAC Congress in Saint Lucia in October.  RedLAC is a network of environmental funds for Latin America and the Caribbean, and John’s panel focused on how environmental funds can play several key roles for financing 30x30 in the region. 

 

While working with Minderoo, John also planned and led a workshop here at Stony Brook in June on coral reef resilience as part of an NSF grant led by SOMAS professors Anne McElroy and Karine Kleinhaus.  Inspired by Dr. Kleinhaus’s work in the Red Sea, the workshop brought 20 people from 6 countries around the world, including IOCS Executive Director Dr. Ellen Pikitch.  Over two days of meetings, they discussed regional and global approaches for building coral reef resilience, and have a series of additional goals they hope to complete as part of the project next year.


From June through October, John also worked with The Nature Conservancy and Seychelles Conservation and Climate Adaptation Trust on an analysis to update cost estimates and evaluate financial mechanisms to support protection of 32% of the country’s EEZ. This project was an opportunity for John to apply the methods he developed for evaluating MPA finance from his Ph.D. with IOCS in a new part of the world.  In September, he travelled to Seychelles where he led a full day workshop to present results from the analysis.  The meeting was attended by over 50 stakeholders including the Seychelles Minister of the Environment, and the results will be presented to the government this year.


John also began working with the Global Fund for Coral Reefs again in April of this year as part of a new post as a Programme Development Advisor with the UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF). 


As part of this work, he travelled to Cali, Colombia, for COP16, the largest biodiversity COP in history. As part of the delegation for the Mesoamerican Reef Fund (MAR Fund), he supported several meetings and events for the Global Fund for Coral Reefs and UNCDF. This included a closed-door meeting for an Ocean Finance Dialogue with member states, international government agencies, NGOs, and other stakeholders, as well as an emergency session for coral reefs led by ambassador Peter Thomson.


John looks forward to closing out the year by taking part in a November workshop in Bogotá, Colombia to talk about sustainable finance for the Amazon rainforest, where he will present on his Ph.D. research on protected area finance in Colombia.  He will also travel to Geneva in early December for the Executive Board meeting with the Global Fund for Coral Reefs as part of his work to support the program with UNCDF.  He looks forward to continuing much of this work into 2025, including finding opportunities to pilot a new marine conservation finance tool he published with colleagues from the Conservation Finance Alliance earlier this year.   




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