On 16 September during the 2003 World Parks Congress in Durban, South Africa, the president of Madagascar, HEM Marc Ravalomanana, the Minister of Environment and the Minister of Foreign Affairs announced a plan to triple the existing protected areas network in Madagascar. The stressed the important role World Heritage Convention can play to achieve Madagascar’s conservation goals.

The announcement was an historical and unprecedented commitment towards the conservation of up to Madagascar’s rich natural heritage. President Ravalomanana emphasized the necessity of this plan for preserving forest and marine biodiversity in particular.

A 594,000 square kilometre island, Madagascar shelters a unique concentration of biodiversity, including more than 12,000 endemic species of plants, five endemic families of birds, 346 species of reptiles, 154 species of amphibians, five families and 48 species of lemurs, as well as almost 75 percent of all marine species in the western Indian Ocean.
Over the past 30 years, deforestation has reduced Madagascar’s forests from 20 million to 9 million hectares

The protected areas network in Madagascar currently covers only three percent of the national territory (1,700,000 hectares). This figure is far from the benchmarks set at the last World Parks Congress in Bali in 1992, which aimed for each national protected area network to reach at least 10 percent of the national territory.

The President declared that Madagascar would work towards reaching this 10 percent goal by the year 2009. To do this, the Malagasy Government is tripling the protected areas surface from 1.7 million hectares to 6 million, including one million hectares of marine sites along 5,000 kilometers coastal area. The extension will reinforce the existing protected area network by adding at least three new marine protected areas and by developing a new mechanism for implementing new conservation sites in Madagascar.

The president highlighted the key roles of international conventions in Madagascar’s environmental action plans, including the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, the RAMSAR Convention on Wetlands and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

A United Nations Foundation project is currently underway in collaboration with UNESCO and ANGAP, the national agency in charge of the management of protected areas, to prepare a nomination dossier for the first natural forest serial site for World Heritage Listing as early as 2005.