Sea Turtle Conservation & Environmental Education

Greetings and a very happy new year from the Corcovado Foundation!

The Sea Turtle Program has been offered a wonderful opportunity to give a presentation at the Annual Symposium on Sea Turtle Biology and Conservation in New Orleans in April! This is a perfect moment to share our experiences, successes and struggles of the last eight years of working with the community of Drake Bay, as the Foundation prepares to hand over the conservation project to local control in 2014. The program has only once before presented at this prestigious international event, in 2010, when Research Assistant Alison Le-Garec gave a seminar in front of the world’s sea turtle experts in Goa, India, about the creation of the local association in the village of El Progreso. Now, four years on, and many stormy night patrols and training workshops later, the same association aims to manage the project for themselves in 2014. The path was not easy, and the dissemination of the lessons learned from this endeavor will be of great value to those wishing to adopt a similar model and empower other poor communities around the world.

Unfortunately, there is presently no funding for the Corcovado Foundation turtle program in 2014, and we must appeal to the selfless generosity of private donors to turn this opportunity into a reality. We must raise USD $1000 before the end of March in order for the Program Coordinator to be able to present the seminar at the symposium in New Orleans. If you wish to see other conservation programs around the world to emulate the community-led model that we have pursued in Drake Bay, please make a donation of whatever you can spare to allow us to share our experience. Thank you so much for your kind generosity at this important moment!

The Team