Ground-Breaking Initiative Strengthens Bi-national Collaboration
EcoLogic is moving forward with a ground-breaking initiative that unites communities separated by a national border for the protection of a common natural resource.
The Bi-national Management Plan for the Sarstoon River Basin builds on EcoLogic’s previous efforts with partner organizations on either side of the Sarstoon River to engage communities in local governance of natural resources and to establish sustainable livelihood alternatives that reduce the impact of the rural poor on critical natural resources.
Moving Forward
Upon a recent trip to the region, Executive Director Shaun Paul and Regional Director Sebastián Charchalac signed firm partnership agreements with local organizations to move forward with a regional management plan. The plan involves coordination and cooperative management between EcoLogic, the Sarstoon Temash Institute for Indigenous Management (SATIIM), Ak'Tenamit, and the newly-formed Mayan Association for Well-Being in the Sarstún Region (APROSARSTUN).
The project is expected to begin this year, with the hiring of a Bi-national Program Officer at EcoLogic, who would collaborate and coordinate the activities of our partners in the area.
The project’s main objectives are to improve local environmental stewardship (including land use and marine resource use) and to strengthen coordinated bi-national management of the Sarstoon River Basin. To accomplish this, EcoLogic will:
- facilitate cross-border learning exchanges between marine resource-user communities to agree on standards around fishing practices and establish management of a locally-declared marine protected area;
- strengthen livelihood security by introducing agroforestry systems on demonstration plots, facilitating the construction of fuel-efficient wood stoves, and developing marketing channels for sustainable seafood catch to yield access to price premiums; and
- build the capacity of local organizations to promote outreach and community education, discussions with national-level decision-makers, and larger-scale communications campaigns related to coastal and marine conservation.
An Ecosystem Under Threat
The Sarstoon estuary boasts international priority status as it links to the increasingly threatened waters of the Caribbean’s Gulf of Honduras. Recognized by the United Nations Environment Programme Global Programme of Action (UNEP-GPA) and the Global Environment Facility's (GEF) Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System Project, this 
area represents a priority component of regional conservation initiatives and is part of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor. It is also an important wildlife corridor connecting protected areas and Ramsar sites in Belize and Guatemala. The estuary is predominantly populated by seagrass communities with a number of echinoderms (such as sea stars, sea urchins, sand dollars, and sea cucumbers), crustaceans (including giant hermit, blue-eye hermit, and blue crab), and fish (such as jacks, snappers, parrotfishes, grunts, and mojarras). Two marine mammal species occur regularly in the area: the West Indian manatee and the bottlenose dolphin. With more mature fish populations threatened by overfishing, the area appears to be dominated by juvenile fish, who depend on the seagrass beds as a vital nursery and feeding area.
The world's marine and coastal ecosystems provide valuable goods and services. In particular, continental shelves, coastal margins and estuaries are major fishing grounds; productive and diverse habitats such as mangroves, mudflats, and sea-grass meadows provide services for a variety of organisms, including humans, that are of great ecological and commercial value. Some of the world's most valuable coastal and marine ecosystems are found in the Gulf of Honduras and the Sarstoon River Basin, which unfortunately are also quite vulnerable to the impacts of human activities. While the river forms an international border between Belize and Guatemala and sister protected areas, current coordination between Belizeans and Guatemalans is insufficient to meet the challenge of protecting this shared ecosystem.
The chief direct threats to the Sarstoon Basin's wealth of biodiversity are deforestation, overfishing, water contamination, unregulated hunting, and oil exploration. These threats have been identified by researchers through EcoLogic-sponsored Rapid Ecological Assessments and reaffirmed in a series of meetings with local stakeholders from both Guatemala and Belize, including non-governmental organizations, government institutions, community-based organizations, and participatory consultations of 16 Guatemalan communities and 5 Belizean communities. Adequate responses to these environmental threats are hampered by limited data and institutional capacity as well as a legal and regulatory framework for the management and protection of the region’s coastal environment.
Unfortunately, despite being interconnected both ecologically and ethnically, local communities on opposite sides of the border too often see one another as adversaries in competition for dwindling fish stocks and other natural resources. This competition plays out in the transboundary area because, as a contested border, it is not always clear who has fishing rights or jurisdiction to enforce fishing regulations, and no-take seasons are not well coordinated between nations.
Collaboration for Success
EcoLogic works with various stakeholders within the bi-national area including community members, community-based organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government agencies, and donor institutions. Various bi-national meetings and forums have taken place between stakeholders over the past six years to identify and build consensus around natural resource conservation and sustainable economic development. This proposed initiative will support transboundary communication between NGOs that have a presence in the area, in particular, EcoLogic, SATIIM and APROSARSTUN. EcoLogic will work to coordinate communication and participation of NGOs, community leaders, and local resource users.
EcoLogic recently helped organize two local Guatemalan community-based organizations, APROSARSTUN and the Fisherfolk Association of Barra Sarstun (ASOPABS). Both APROSARSTUN and ASOPABS are growing increasingly prepared to serve as viable local counterparts to SATIIM and to help facilitate engagement of Guatemalan communities in protected area management.
Ak'Tenamit is EcoLogic's newest strategic partner in Guatemala. It serves students from poor, remote villages, accessible only by mud tracks or rivers. Most of those villages consequently lack such basic infrastructure as water systems, latrines, or electricity. Given the size of the problem, Ak'Tenamit has taken an educational approach, training community leaders and educating young people in sustainable development and social improvement. By coordinating the participation of community brigades, students, volunteers, and international donors, Ak'Tenamit has catalyzed grassroots efforts to improve village life through the adoption of sustainable agriculture, the creation of handicraft cooperatives, and the construction of water systems, improved latrines, energy efficient stoves, and communal corn mills.
SATIIM is a community based indigenous environmental organization working in the far south of Belize, in a region in the Toledo District that lies between the Sarstoon and Temash Rivers. SATIIM co-manages, with the Belizean Forestry Department, the 41,898 acre Sarstoon Temash National Park. EcoLogic helped found SATIIM in 1998.
Creating Lasting Change
Building on EcoLogic's history in the area, where it began work in 1999 on the Belizean side of the Sarstoon River with SATIIM and helped established a successful model for indigenous communities to manage the Sarstoon Temash National Park (STNP), EcoLogic's proposed work will help achieve consensus among local fishermen and farmers on strategies to improve collaboration regarding the use of shared resources. The practical focus on fisheries management responds to direct stakeholder input and the inherent interdependency of indigenous Q'eqchi Maya and Garifuna resource users from both countries on this common resource base. EcoLogic sees a coordinated bi-national approach as the most effective way to achieve its conservation goals in the region.
EcoLogic aims to create a platform for transboundary collaboration around the governance of sustainable natural resource use by increasing these rural communities’ awareness of and participation in sustainable natural resource management. A chief component of the proposed project is community education and leadership development. EcoLogic will train and support community members to become community leaders and promote conservation and sustainable natural resource use within their respective communities. Our work will involve 21 local communities, including 32 Guatemalan youth (founding members of APROSARSTUN) and 5 young Belizeans previously trained to perform Rapid Ecological Assessments in projects supported by EcoLogic. EcoLogic's operating assumption is that to make it possible for local communities to live their environmental values and cooperate across borders, we must begin by energizing, engaging, and building the capacity of the young women and men who will be future leaders and decision makers in this ecosystem that transcends borders and cultures.
This project commits to helping improve a transboundary issue that, while heavily studied by a handful of researchers, has never been successfully acted upon by academics or other NGOs operating in the area. EcoLogic's participatory, practical, transboundary approach increases the likelihood that concrete changes to resource use will endure within local communities and inspire others to take similar action. Instead of telling Guatemalan and Belizean communities to change practices, we are showing them how to do innovative work – by helping to establish demonstration agroforestry plots, facilitating local-level watershed conservation planning, and organizing learning exchanges across national borders. This work reflects EcoLogic’s holistic approach to conservation, supporting projects that offer tangible results responding to community-defined priorities in a manner that influences national and regional policy-making, in turn enabling enduring conservation of biodiversity with a range of committed stakeholders. Local leaders leverage success at the local level to educate and sensitize policy-makers to incorporate practices that consider the fundamental interdependence between local wisdom, nature, and people in determining their own destinies.
David Kramer, Barbara Vallarino, and Claudia González contributed significantly to this article. Photos taken by EcoLogic staff.