Coastal and Wetland Biodiversity Management at Cox's Bazar and Hakakuki Haor

In recent years, Bangladesh has demonstrated increased determination and commitment to address the chal-lenges of ensuring sustainable use and conservation of its natural resources, including its biodiversity. A number of specific policies, laws, action plans and strategies have been developed in this regard. A major current chal-lenge is to ensure the effective implementation of the 1995 Environmental Conservation Act, which includes a key provision providing the Department of Environment (DoE) with broad powers for conservation of sites that it determines to be Ecologically Critical Areas (ECAs). In the context of implementing the PRIF for this project, DoE has taken the crucial step of nominating the first six ECAs, all within the country’s highly significant coastal, marine and freshwater wetland ecosystems. The overall objective of the present project is to establish and demonstrate an innovative system for management of ECAs in Bangladesh that will have a significant and positive impact on the long-term viability of the country’s important biodiversity resources. The project will support DoE efforts to operationalize the ECA concept at two main sites: one site (which includes three ECAs) within the country’s long and biodiversity-rich coastal zone and the second at one of the largest and most im-portant of the country’s many inland freshwater wetlands. Through a combination of GEF incremental cost fi-nancing and baseline and co-financing, conservation and sustainable use of these sites will be demonstrated. This demonstration should create important opportunities for replication in coastal, freshwater wetland and other ecosystems throughout the country, including sites recently nominated as ECAs.