Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) - partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 01 April 2010

Ministers and officials from ten countries and territories in East Africa yesterday endorsed or signed off on a potentially far-reaching protocol to protect East Africa’s coastal and marine environment from land-based activities and pollution.

The new protocol – five years in the making – makes the western Indian Ocean the third marine area of the world to achieve a multilateral agreement to limit and control land-based impacts on the marine environment, after the Mediterranean (1980) and Wider Caribbean (1999).

The parties to the agreement are Madagascar, Comoros, Seychelles, Reunion, Mauritius, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa, which will be signing the protocol in the near future.

Durban Beach. Burgeoning cities such as Durban are threatening the very resource base that sustains them.

“This agreement comes at an opportune time, and will be assisting us with our initiatives in coast East Africa to save one of the few remaining areas of the world that are still unspoilt,” said Dr Amani Ngusaru, head of WWF’s Coastal East Africa Marine Programme.

“Over 60 million people in eastern and southern Africa live and depend on the goods and services provided by the coastal and marine ecosystems of coastal east Africa.” Continue reading Conservation protocol for coastal East Africa