To secure long-term funding for MPAs, it's essential to build a strong business case, measure and monitor impacts, and maintain transparent communication with financial partners. Developing trust and demonstrating the MPA's added value are crucial steps.

Obtaining sustainable financing

If you’ve identified which financing mechanisms are feasible for your MPA, you need to develop and implement a strategy to access those funds on an ongoing basis.

An important part of this is convincing stakeholders to provide funding or support the implementation of the financing mechanisms you’ve identified.

Most important is to show your stakeholders what’s in it for them by building the business case of your MPA. This can be communicated through concept notes.

Measuring and monitoring your impact gives you the opportunity to continuously communicate the added value of your MPA. Doing so helps build trust, which is an important ingredient for a long-lasting relationship with stakeholders and funding partners.

Budgeting and planning

To obtain long-lasting funding, it’s essential to first understand the MPA’s financial needs, both current and forecast for the (near) future.

The budget overview gives you an insight into the financial needs and how much income is generated currently. The exercise of financial planning should provide useful projections of future costs over longer periods with different scenarios.

The resources needed should be divided into cost categories connected to managing your MPA. The three main cost categories are establishment costs, operational costs and compliance costs, although different categories and terms can be used.

The business case for your MPA 

After analysing the resources needed to manage your MPA, the next step is to build your business case demonstrating the importance of your work. The business case is the justification for the work the MPA undertakes, and it needs to show what value the MPA creates. A strong business case also articulates why an MPA and your management approach is the best way to create this value, compared to alternatives.

Among the most important values are the ecosystem services that the MPA manages, protects and/or enhances. These provide different benefits to different stakeholders: for example, for fishers the value of an MPA is in higher fish catch, while for residents it can be access to clean beaches (see Measuring MPA economic benefits Q&A).

Understanding which values the MPA generates to whom helps you build the business case for the group you're targeting. You want to convince a specific group to pay for the benefits they receive from the MPA, or to help implement a financing mechanism – for example, to get the local diving sector to collect a marine park entry fee.

Concept notes

One way to communicate your impact is through concept notes. These concept notes can be on different topics of impact generated by your MPA – for example, you might produce a two-pager on the value of the MPA for blue economy activities or for carbon sequestration. Different groups are interested in different topics – the tourism industry wants to hear about pristine beaches and clean waters, while multilateral agencies might be interested in how improved protection and connectivity supports biodiversity. Each potential financier needs to be convinced of the benefits they receive because you manage the MPA.

Monitor and measure impact

While you may have a good idea of the benefits created through managing the MPA, it’s important to monitor and measure these benefits (see Measuring MPA economic benefits Q&A). Your MPA’s impact is the added value that it creates. This is something the MPA should be compensated for, whether in money or through other types of support. Communicating your MPA’s impact is an important part of continuously proving your business case to sustain the financial streams (Communicating sustainable financing Q&A).

Building trust

If you’ve attracted the attention of one or more beneficiaries to generate an income stream, it’s crucial to develop an engagement strategy (See Brijuni National Park case study). Make sure you should budget for these communication and engagement activities.

Your engagement strategy should focus on building a long-term relationship. Ensure transparency, accountability and good governance to build a good and trustworthy relationship. Each relationship will have different components, such as promoting regular and open communication and providing up-to-date information about financial flows, conservation impact and changes in management, strategies or planning.