Overall objective / activities to be implemented under the grant:
Recourse to highly destructive livelihood methods in Rud Shour, Shirin and Minab International wetland such as fuel smuggling has caused serious damage to the region?s habitats. In some parts of the mangrove forests, a thick layer of oil pollution leakage on the leaves has caused widespread drying of the trees, aerial roots and also the mud around them, leading to the aridification in a large area of mangrove forests. Furthermore, the negative and significant socio-economic effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on local communities has led to the full shutting down of community-based tourism activities and also the tourism dependent industries in the wetland area.
To address the situation, the project seeks to manage and restrain, as a pilot scheme, unsustainable and destructive exploitation driven by socio-economic pressures of the COVID-19 crisis, such as unsustainable fishery using destructive fishing methods like trawling, overfishing and out-of-season fishing. The project also intend to eliminate, as much as possible, the socioeconomic contexts of false and risky jobs connected to the wetland such as fuel smuggling which reduces the resilience and widespread drying of mangrove trees.
The objectives of the project are to revitalize and rebuild the chain of sustainable tourism services based on COVID-19 healthcare guidelines, introduce and develop new sustainable non-mass tourism models suitable to the Coronavirus restrictions, manage the infrastructures and to improve mangrove seedling production methods and capacities by a group of women in Cooperative established and to market the products, and to construct an anti-trawling artificial habitat structure as a passive method deterring trawling operations.