The Arnavon Community Marine Conservation Area (ACMCA) was the first Marine Protected Area (MPA) to be officially established in Solomon Islands.

It is now 20 years since it was officially opened in August 1995.

ACMCA is a partnership effort between the Kia, Wagina and Katupika communities, Isabel and Choiseul Provincial Governments, Solomon Islands Ministries of Environment (MECDM) and Fisheries (MFMR) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC).

ACMCA is currently mandated under the Resource Management Ordinance of Isabel Province pending consultations and submission to the Protected Area Advisory Committee for deliberations and declaration under the Protected Areas Act 2010.

My aim of writing this article is twofold.

Firstly, I wish to provide the communities and the general public who are currently engaged in conservation with some retrospective lessons about the challenges and the opportunities that ACMCA has gone through over the last 20 years.

Secondly, I wish to celebrate 20 years of conservation at ACMCA and respect and honour those that have gone before us who had the vision and foresight to initiate the establishment of ACMCA in the early 1990s.

The most important flagship in the ACMCA is the hawksbill turtles.

Under the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the international organization that monitors the population, trends of fauna and flora (animals/plants) on earth, the hawksbill turtles are categorised as a critically endangered species.

This means that the global population of hawksbill has experienced dramatic declines over the past century and hawksbill turtles face a high probability of becoming extinct in the near future.

Four world renowned turtle scientists (Jean Mortimer, Broderick, Peter Dutton and Collin Limpus) that IUCN has engaged to assess the global status of hawksbill turtles have directly or indirectly worked with the conservation officers and rangers of ACMCA.

This in itself reflects how important ACMCA nesting beaches are in relation to the global population and trends of hawksbill turtles.

Turtle trade began in Solomon Islands almost two hundred years ago, with the shells of the hawksbill turtle being a highly prized commodity in European markets in the 1900s, and a high value product in Japan following the Second World War.

Research on turtles in Solomon Islands began in the1960s, and by the early 1990s it was clear that the Arnavons Hawksbill population was in severe decline, a consequence of over a hundred years of commercial hunting.

Recognition of these marked declines led to renewed efforts to discuss with stakeholder the need to protect the Arnavons in 1992.

This was followed by successive terrestrial and marine assessments and meetings which eventually led to the opening of ACMCA as a Marine Protected Area in August 1995 under a partnership agreement.

Now it is 20 years on, what are some of the challenges, opportunities and lessons learnt that ACMCA has come through over these 2 decades?

1) ACMCA provides platform for Good Governance and Cultural Coexistence.

ACMCA is situated in the Manning Strait between Isabel and Choiseul Provinces.

The conservation area is 157.8 square kilometres of which only 3 sq km is land while the rest are waters and submerged reefs.

Although the primary focus of ACMCA is resource protection and management, the real challenge is and has been ensuring a harmonious coexistence between nature and human beings.

Through this unique partnership, ACMCA over these years has managed to unite community, language, provincial and religious boarders and cultural ethnicities.

Conservation officers from these three communities live eat and work together in the conservation area months in and months out as brothers.

The conservation officers also visit communities and participate in community awareness, and getting to know people by name in these three different communities.

ACMCA is governed by a board of management that is made up of respected men and women leaders of the three communities.

These leaders are either representative of chiefs, church groupings, women groups, youths and tribal leaders.

The board of management meets three times in a year and the chairmanship of the board rotates within these three communities every second year.

The current chair of the board is a youth from Wagina that was seconded to ACMCA by Managatabu, the highest community council of Wagina Community.

Incidentally, the maritime boundaries of Isabel and Choiseul Provinces cuts across the two main islands in the Arnavon Group of Islands (Kerehikapa and Sikopo), however because of the ACMCA Protected Area and the dynamics of the marine life in the place, the officials of Isabel and Choiseul Provinces agreed that the boundary of ACMCA is a ‘dead end’, meaning that the maritime boundaries of the two provinces ends at the ACMCA boundaries, as both Provinces have high regard and respect of what ACMCA has achieved in relation to good governance in these 2 provinces over the years.

ACMCA provides the opportunity for the conservation officers to meet people in all walks of life including yachties, film makers, scientists, government officers and the conservation officers were honoured to host the Governor General of Solomon Islands at one time.

2) ACMCA Provides Opportunity for Conservation Leverages

People of different age groups in all walks of life who have visited ACMCA have come back with memories that will linger in their lives for a long time.

I believe what makes ACMCA captivating is that in ACMCA nature comes so close to us.

Some visitors have made remarks that, “they feel that God is so close”.

Seeing nature firsthand gives them the urge to have an ‘Arnavon’ at their village or community.

ACMCA has had the privilege of hosting school children and visitors from communities in Western, Choiseul, Isabel and Guadalcanal Provinces throughout these years.

LMMAs have since spread to other parts of the country from inspirations gained from these visits.

It speaks truth of the phrase that “seeing is believing”.

For example, the first MPA in Choiseul was established in 2005 following the Lauru Land Conference Tribal Community (LLCTC) field trip to the Arnavons in October 2004 during their annual general meeting in Wagina.

To date there are now 24 MPAs/LMMAs in Choiseul Province and their numbers are increasing.

In 2003, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) hosted a planning meeting in Madang, Papua New Guinea for the Bismarck Solomon Seas what they called the Bismarck Solomon Sea Ecoregions (BSSE).

In that meeting the delegates from Solomon Islands realised that there was a lot of gap for marine data for the country.

Similarly at the same time ACMCA management were planning to do a marine assessment for what we called the Greater Arnavons (areas from northern Isabel starting from Suavanao Islands to Robroy Islands in South Choiseul).

Coming back from that meeting, we decided that instead of just doing the Greater Arnavons, let us do the marine assessments for the whole country.

So, with the assistance of Solomon Islands Government and partners, the Solomon Islands Rapid Ecological Assessments (REA) was done in 2004, and the findings of this survey resulted in making Solomon Islands to become part of the Coral Triangle.

An idea intended for ACMCA resulted in Solomon Islands becoming one of the six countries that make up the most biodiverse marine environment on the planet.

3) Financial Challenges and the Innovation of Arnavon Endowments

ACMCA was initially financially supported by multilaterals/bilateral donors, foundations and individuals.

Unfortunately such funding is normally only given for a specific time period, and considerable effort is needed to continually seek new sources of funding to keep the ACMCA going.

This became challenging for us, as there are many other MPAs/LMMAs emerging in the country and we are often knocking on the same door with some other conservation projects.

Furthermore, donors typically do not want to fund the same activity year in and year out.

This led us to think of Endowment as a possible way forward.

The concept of an Endowment is such that you have some capital money invested somewhere and then you leave the capital to grow over time and only draw down the interest of the investment.

The challenge is who is going to give the seed money and where are you going to invest it?

Generally, donors want to see the result of their investment immediately, rather than investing it for years.

The good thing about ACMCA is that the communities and partners have been managing ACMCA for more than 10 years, giving the confidence and trust for someone to initially put their money on the table for the endowment.

It took a lot of convincing but we were able to win the trust of a donor for some seed money.

It has since grown and is bearing the interest of approximately $24,000 USD per annum.

The ACMCA endowment is the foundation that ensures long term financial sustainability of ACMCA, without it the ACMCA conservation initiative would be highly vulnerable to changes in the funding landscape and hence likely to be short lived.

Currently the interest is still insufficient to financially sustain the annual recurrent costs of ACMCA.

We have visitor’s fees to meet some of the expenses, yet this still does meet all the costs, the largest expense of managing the ACMCA being fuel costs.

We are still canvassing support to increase the capital of the ACMCA endowment, so that it will bear greater interest in the future and help to sustain ACMCA in perpetuity.

The concept of an endowment may also apply to any other sites who would like to go down a similar path.

There are also other options out there but we need to be creative and innovative about the options.

4) Transfer of Knowledge and Skills

One of the most challenging questions that many times we are asked is, “What are the benefits of ACMCA?”

Although this question has lots of merit in it, at the same time it may be biased in that our perception of benefits is equated in monetary terms and tangible assets.

Knowledge and skills are taken for granted and seldom perceived as benefits.

The knowledge, skills and exposures that Community Conservation Officers have acquired over the years in their tenure with ACMCA is enormous.

They have associated with professionals in monitoring the flora and fauna in the ACMCA which includes satellite monitoring of the migratory paths of the hawksbill turtles.

Conservation officers from ACMCA have been sharing the turtle monitoring skills to other communities in the country and abroad.

A recent scientific report that was published this year confirms that the conservation efforts are working, with the number of nests laid at the ACMCA doubling since the establishment of the ACMCA in 1995.

This is the first known evidence of recovery for a western pacific hawksbill rookery.

5) Living Marine Laboratory

Chief Leslie Miki, of Kia, one of the original founders of ACMCA, said that he wants ACMCA to become, “a living marine laboratory where fish and man are friends”.

Today, schools in northern Isabel and southern Choiseul make the annual visits to ACMCA as one of the highlights of their annual calendars.

Schools as far as Western Province have also visited the ACMCA in recent years.

Some of the highlights of the