In developing this profile, root causes considered included poverty, inadequate access to education, and conflicting national policies. More proximate threats include local community activities that are incompatible with biodiversity conservation; small-scale mining; and lack of local constituency for conservation issues. Given the relatively small amount of money available through CEPF for this region, project designers had to make some choices regarding resource allocation. This project is fundamentally regional in its approach and proposes to provide incremental value in addressing some national-level root causes directly, such as policies regarding natural resource extraction. In other cases, it is taking on more proximate cause issues, such as problems at the level of communities and municipalities. The communications component seeks to build a constituency for conservation at the national and local levels.
Recognizing that its resources are limited, the CEPF has always proposed to play a strategic coordination role and in so doing leverage considerably more resources in support of conservation than it could possibly bring to the table itself. In this spirit, CEPF proposes to invest significantly in activities that will focus the many disparate efforts at work in this vast corridor while ensuring that the best and most objective information is available to shape decision-making by a broad range of actors. In this way, CEPF expects to influence the root causes of biodiversity loss, albeit indirectly in some cases.
It has been determined that the most strategically compelling niche for CEPF is to focus on filling the gaps between existing efforts and investments. For this reason, defining the mechanisms to ensure the proper coordination among existing efforts is a major component of each of the profiles. It must also be understood that the set of CEPF objectives is not meant to resolve all of the threats described in the profile. CEPF is one small element of much larger strategies in each ecosystem. Given the current levels of investment, the programs and strategies already in place and those anticipated, CEPF strives to fill a particular niche that has yet to be addressed at the level required for positive impact. This niche, and the main objective of the CEPF, is to provide civil society, organizations, and individuals with the capacity to manage biodiversity conservation more effectively. CEPF focuses on this group based on the hypothesis that sustainable biodiversity conservation will only be realized if civil society groups existing within the critical ecosystems drive the process. To extend the logic, if these groups become the actors and voices for biodiversity conservation, then decision-makers will begin to incorporate these issues into national and transboundary policies, legislation and action. Only if this impact is achieved will resources from the CEPF be able to realize sustainable biodiversity conservation.
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