Definition of Best Practices and Guidelines for Fundraising and Development Planning in Marine Protected Areas

Name of client: University Consortium for Socio-Economical and Environmental Research (CURSA)

Origin of funding: Public Fund

Detailed description of project:

The project aims to identify a number of opportunities regarding to the finance of the Italian Marine Protected Areas (MPA), providing a guidance for the procurement of resources through the development of projects aimed to the acquisition of public funds from the EU, state, region, etc.. and to the launch and management of private initiatives, which could generate local income and create jobs.The specific objectives of this initiative can be summarized as follows:

• conduct a survey of the experiences of self fundraising in the Italian and Mediterranean MPA;
• classify the experiences based on the type of services performed, the value of profitability, the results obtained in terms of nature conservation, local development, employment, etc.;
• measure the attractiveness of public funds (EU, state, region, other agencies) of the italian MPA, also taking into account potential naturally expressed or induced by the best economic conditions in the local context;
• assess the level of feasibility and replicability of the experiences of self-financing generating a database;

The project started exploring the preliminary conditions of economic and financial partnership and attitude to risk in the business of private participation in initiatives concerning the management of activities and services in an environmentally sound environmental value AMP (eco-tourism, services for boaters, services encourage the use of the area to the disabled, etc.).
The project output is a guidelines for self-financing and development of projects to be disseminated at those managers AMP.

Type of services provided:

The project consists of the following actions:

• Analysis of ordinary financial channels of AMP in Italy;
• Recognition on the Italian MPA ability to acquire funds and data collection on the experiences of self-financing in Italy;
• Data collection on the experiences of self in the context of the Mediterranean basin;
• Identification of specific indicators for the assessment of the experience of self-financing, based on environmental, economic and social matter;
• Application of the indicators identified in the classification of all good practice.
• Identification of replicable experiences in the Italian context (best practices);
• Database creation of the experiences identified;
• Definition of the legal and regulatory framework of reference;
• Defining how to implement private activities within MPAs;
• Drafting of the guidelines.