Our long-term partners in Cameroon are the Ocean Volunteers (Bénévoles Océan) with Jeauberte Djamou at the helm. In recent years they often organised beach clean ups in Douala’s balnearic town of Kribi with different schools. This year, Mundus maris had made avalable the French version of the Role Play tested at the recent conference of young marine researchers in Hamburg to support their celebrations. The role play is intended to engage young adults with making a marine protected area work in a ficticious country. The objective is to familiarise with the different perspectives of a range of stakeholders and rights holders when it comes to protect marine biodiversity and restore functioning ecosystems in search of locally adapted solutions. The Global Biodiversity Framework was agreed after lengthy negotiations by governments in December 2022 and proposes among a host of other measures to establish marine protected areas in 30% of the ocean to address the on-going sixth mass species extinction. But it will only happen when a broad social consensus is built around the urgent need to act with concrete and effective measures. The different characters of the role play were developed based on interviews with a range of experts and supplemented by literature research.

Against this backdrop during the celebration of World Ocean Day this June 8, 2024 in Yaoundé, Cameroon, the Ocean Volunteers organised a rmodified role play for engagement in the protection of marine biodiversity on the theme « the ‘ocean first’. This activity saw the participation of ten friends of the ocean embodying different stakeholders in the management of the Manyange na Elombo-Campo marine protected area (MPA). The participants, each in their area of expertise, took up the challenges linked to the management of this marine national park and, above all, proposed some ideas. The moderator in turn gave the floor to the local mayor, the director of the marine protected area, a local resident, an artisanal fisherman from the locality and the captain of a trawler and moderated the interventions of the natural scientist, the representative of a local tourism company, the manager of the water treatment plant and a leader of an NGO working to protect the ocean. The role of the moderator ended after the announcement of a final intervention for the debriefing, that of the forest and environment expert, present at this activity. With the “Ocean Volunteers”, it’s the ocean first. Watch here the recording of their role play.