The Second Certificate Course on Coastal and Marine Biodiversity and Protected Area Management” for field-level staff of the Forest Departments was inaugurated on 1st December 2015 at Havelock Island, Andaman with 13 participants comprising largely Range Forest Officers representing Gujarat, Maharashtra, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha and Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The first part of the course include the open water scuba diving training and the under water biodiversity monitoring. This course is being organized jointly by the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH.

This is the part of project titled “Conservation and Sustainable Management of Coastal and Marine Protected Areas (CMPA)” of the Indo-German Biodiversity Programme of GIZ that aims at strengthening capacities of key training and learning organizations relevant to Marine Protected Areas (MPAs). This course is intended to enable the participants to have a sound understanding of the concepts and issues related to managing coastal and marine biodiversity, coastal and marine protected areas, ecological and socio-political context, conservation approaches and legal-policy framework between terrestrial and coastal marine PAs, as well as to acquire necessary skills to conduct assessment and monitoring of coastal and marine habitats and species and prepare field reports, and develop-under supervision-operational plan for MPAs based on management effectiveness guidelines (Contact: ksivakumar [at] wii [dot] gov [dot] in for further details).