Protecting international waters

The FGEF’s new Strategic Programming Framework (SPF) has now been released. The SPF is a strategic planning instrument released every two years to facilitate implementation of the missions assigned to the FGEF and monitoring of the relevant activities by the members of its Steering Committee.

The new SPF was developed following a strategic, operational and financial audit of the FGEF in 2010. The conclusions of this assessment confirmed the relevance of the FGEF's position on global environment issues related to sustainable development in developing countries. They also underlined the fundamental importance of the innovation concept specific to the FGEF, and the replication of associated activities to strengthen their impact.

This retrospective assessment also served as a basis for the decision to replenish the FGEF’s resources for 2011-2014 to a total of 95 million euros.

The SPF’s development is first of all an opportunity for assessing the FGEF’s activities in 2009-2010, when 33 new projects were launched with total grants of 36.87 million €.

The programming framework also sets out the FGEF’s mission and mandates for 2011-2012, and its strategic guidelines for each of the global environment topic areas in which it is involved.

The SPF emphasises Africa and the Mediterranean as the priority geographical areas for FGEF intervention. Developing partnerships with the private sector, civil society and research also remains a major focus of FGEF activities for 2011-2012.

Since technological advances have made every part of the ocean accessible to humans, areas and resources that lie beyond national jurisdictions have come under severe and increasing threat from varied and intensifying human activities  such as maritime transport and deep-sea fishing. It has become a matter of urgency to look anew at the management of areas and resources that do not come under national jurisdictions.