SICCP Background & History
The Solomon Islands lie at a crossroads. Separating the rich continental faunas of Australasia and the isolated islands of a sprawling Pacific, no other oceanic archipelago supports a greater proportion of the Earth’s living diversity, or a richer array of human ways of life and languages. To a biologist, this translates into exceptional patterns of endemism, which are increasingly being revealed as an evolutionary fulcrum generating diversity to the east and to the west. To a humanist or conservationist, this is one of the last great opportunities in tropical Pacific conservation and for maintaining indigenous rights to life within wild country. In the Solomon Islands, we can conserve things that have vanished from nearly every other oceanic archipelago on earth. These opportunities diminish by the day. As across much of the Pacific, a rapidly growing population and increasing pressure to liquidate forest resources threaten the living diversity of the Solomon. Hope lies in our collective efforts to capture pieces of these stunning landscapes in partnership with the diverse human communities whose futures have been entangled with them for all of living memory.
Conservation action in the Solomon Islands since the late 90s’ has embraced community based initiatives, which is depicted in the Solomon Islands Government National Plan of Action (NPoA). This national strategy is focused on local communities efforts have been recognized the importance of their marine ecosystems and forests for biodiversity conservation. Community Management Plans have been developed for low and medium conservation initiatives at numerous sites across the Solomon Islands.
The Solomon Islands Community Conservation Partnership (SICCP) seeks to support people throughout the Solomon Islands in sustainably managing their natural resources as a key contribution to their wellbeing and conserving important global biological diversity. We support communities to build capacity to ensure effective natural resources use decision making and management. Solomon Islands Community Conservation Partnership (SICCP) aims to engage and support communities through the use of Community Conservation Agreements (CCA). CCAs are transparent agreements that provide communities and other landowners with benefits and capacity-building in exchange for their participation in effective conservation of high priority areas and species.
Solomon Islands Community Conservation Partnership (SICCP) was first established in 2009 by visionary forerunners in biological diversity conservation with the sole purpose of providing backstopping for funding organizations and to establishing a platform that would enable bridging local communities in the Solomon Islands to the wider global donors and non-government organizations that support the sustainable management use of natural resources. Operations begin in 2014 with the recruitment of a Chief Executive Director and a new set up structure of the organization.
This home grown platform is unique because of its fundamental role in “bridging” local Community Based Organizations (CBO) to the International Donors, Academia and Research Institutions.