Recreational scuba diving is popular in Chile. Many divers enjoy diving in coastal areas that are controlled and managed by local communities, known as TURFs or Áreas de Manejo y Explotación de Recursos Bentónicos in Chile. Hence, diving tourism represents an economic opportunity for many coastal communities. However, there are many challenges to successfully operating a recreational scuba diving venture. Further, establishing the necessary enabling conditions can be important for success.

ACS and Capital Azul recently conducted a rapid assessment on scuba diving business opportunities in Chile. The assessment looked at the state of recreational scuba diving in Chile and collected survey data on diver’s motivations and preferences around scuba diving. We examined several case studies around the world that have successful developed recreational scuba diving ventures that benefit local communities. Last, we developed a roadmap for designing successful diving ventures in Chile.

Along Chile’s long and diverse coastline, nearly 100,000 artisanal fishers catch about half of all seafood landed in the country through a diverse set of activities, which include intertidal gathering, offshore fishing, and diving for nearshore resources. These fishers are therefore central to marine conservation for such programs to succeed. Capital Azul and ACS published an article on the journal Current Conservation that describes our efforts to design and manage a conservation program that is fisher-centered and how it is evolving to provide more benefits to artisanal fishing communities and achieving scale within Chile.

With Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, we led the design of a fellowship program whose goal is build capacity and promote new collaborations in Latin America focused on coastal solutions. The Coastal Solutions Fellows Program (CSF) is building a community of early-career leaders from the academic, private, and non-profit sectors that are working on new approaches to coastal development and ecosystem management. ACS continues to serve on the CSF Advisory Board. Now in its sixth year, the CSF continues to have a big impact across Latin America.

.The Colossal Foundation’s mission mission is to make extinction a thing of the past by putting breakthrough bioscience to work for the species that need it most. Everything they do starts from a simple idea: the same technologies powering our de-extinction efforts can—and must—be deployed today to keep today’s species from disappearing.

ACS is working with the Colossal Foundation to strengthen the strategy of the Foundation to increase its impact.

Throughout 2019, ACS led an effort to design a capacity cohort program for organizations working on fisheries management and marine conservation in Chile. The overarching goal of the program is to build the capacity of Chile grantees of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Walton Family Foundation, and Marisla Foundation. First, we identified and scoped Chilean institutions that offer and execute organizational development and capacity building trainings. During this phase, we also collected relevant information from grantees via an online survey and conducted secondary research on related programs. Second, we conducted in-depth interviews with a short-list of potential implementing partners and synthesized information collected from grantees. Third, we worked with the foundations to select an implementing partner – Glocalminds. Fourth, we worked with Glocalminds to support them in the design and execution of a grantee stakeholder design workshop in Santiago. Following the workshop, Glocalminds finalized and improved the design of the program, which has been named Mingamar. ACS will continue to support Glocalminds as they launch Mingamar during 2020.