About Us

Oceanus Conservation is a non-stock, non-profit environmental organization with headquarters in Makati City, Philippines, established in March 2020.

As the pandemic hit worldwide and the lack of focus back for the environment, we decided to come together and create an organization to bring back the restoration and protection of the Philippine marine habitats especially the undervalued, and unprotected sites – mangroves and seagrass.

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The Challenge

Mangroves and Seagrass

The Philippines has estimated mangrove forests of about 356,000 ha, from the original 500,000 ha back in 1920’s. This loss of cover in the country is due to the conversion of fishponds, illegal logging, and human encroachment, which led to the vulnerability of the country to the impacts of climate change and sea level rise.

Mangrove conservation and management has been neglected in the country for many years because of the national prioritization of coastal development, and aquaculture since the 1990’s. Typhoons and conversion to aquaculture ponds are the two most common type of disturbance that affected this ecosystem for a long time. Between 2000-2012, 36.7% of the forest loss is converted to mainly aquaculture (Richards and Freiss, 2015) with a recent deforestation rate of 0.5% (Gevaña, Camacho, & Pulhin, 2018).

Mangrove ecosystems are valuable both economically and ecologically and provide many ecosystem goods and services to humans valued at $194,000 ha^-1 yr^-1 aside from providing nursery habitat for many wildlife (Duncan et al. 2016). They are also highly effective for carbon storage and sinks, the largest per hectare (Donato et al.,2011). Globally, Philippines rank 10th in terms of mangrove area and carbon storage (104.5 million tonnes) (Hamilton and Freiss, 2018).

Recent studies by Fortes et al. (2018) revealed that Philippines have a larger area of 27,000 km2, the highest among 12 countries assessed in Southeast-Asia. The Philippines also has the largest extent of seagrass meadows, making up at least 24% of its territorial waters (Fortes et al., 2018) and one of the most diverse in the Indo-Pacific (Mizuno et al., 2017; Fortes et al., 2018). Despite their ecological importance for fisheries productivity, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration, seagrass ecosystems in the Philippines remain understudied and underrepresented in conservation policy compared to mangroves and coral reefs, leading to gaps in mapping, long-term monitoring, and effective management strategies (Fortes et al., 2018; Waycott et al., 2009; Unsworth et al., 2019).

 

Our Initiatives