Strengthened drive for nature conservation in Cleopatra’s Needle set

The full-blown campaign for environmental conservation in the identified areas in Palawan will roll out this year, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) said.

Lawrence San Diego, communications manager of USAID in the Philippines, said that specific areas in Palawan will be included in the campaign.

One of these sites is Cleopatra’s Needle Critical Habitat (CNCH), a newly-declared critical habitat covering seven barangays within Puerto Princesa City. The campaign will be taken over by the City Environment and Natural Resources Office.

“Protect Wildlife is ready to support, but ideally City ENRO can take initiative in sustaining the campaign even when the project has ended,” San Diego said.

Last year, to support the expansion of the Protect Wildlife project into more areas in Palawan, USAID and Rare once again conducted the Campaigning for Conservation (C4C) workshop—an intensive training on designing behavior change communication campaigns for environmental conservation.

The trainees developed a campaign to stop the poaching of timber from forests inside CNCH, north of the city. The model campaign aims to encourage indigenous Batak communities within the area to switch to sustainable ecotourism jobs that will support conservation of the city’s newly declared critical habitat.

The purpose of the 10-day workshop is to apply what they learned in behavior change theory, social marketing research, and campaign messaging and design.

Before the end of the 10-day workshop, the C4C trainees produced the campaign materials, including a puppet show, a billboard and a campaign song.

The City ENRO will adopt the campaign as part of their conservation efforts for Cleopatra’s Needle. “Conservation is about people, their attitudes, and behaviors. When you change these, you can see changes happen,” he said.

He explained that by developing materials for the campaign, it should be tailored to fit to the target audience. The campaigners should design an appropriate script, music, and all these should undergo test first to the target community before the actual and full-blown campaign for conservation.

Recently, USAID conducted a 3-day writeshop in Fleuriz Hotel to finalize the proposed campaign in their respective identified sites.

The workshop was participated by participants from the City Environment and Natural Resources Office and City Tourism Office of Puerto Princesa City, CENRO offices of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) in El Nido-Taytay and Quezon, Palawan State University (PSU), Tubbataha Reefs Natural Park, and municipal government of Narra.