Background
After 2023 Natural Conservation Conference at Taipei, we would like to call for another 2025 Natural Conservation Conference at Penghu. The purpose of this conference is to promote coastal management through a wide range of top-down and bottom-up mechanism and processes. The UN is a group of international institutes that initiate and promote issues orienting towards protecting the global environment and benefiting all human societies as a whole. However, the implementation of important programmes cannot be effectively sustained solely by the UN and its subsidiaries. Both regional and national endeavours are required to ensure good results. Furthermore, local endeavours are the authentic drive for a good practice of national park, geopark, small islands and protected area. This is particularly true and significant in a world of diversity and in an era of uncertainty today.
For IUCN-WCPA and UNESCO Global Geoaprks, networking and sharing good protected area and geopark practices are critical elements for success. Taiwan as an island state has 9 national parks, 10 geoparks, 13 national Scenic Areas, all with unique characteristics. The concepts of geopark are a multi-disciplinary and bottom-up civilian model. Geoparks are a dynamic response to a wide range of issues and policies and each small islands, geopark’s response is related to its local cultural, economic, geological and geographical setting as well as the modes of governance. Therefore, local involvement and a locally devised management plan is critical in ensuring an effective response to local issues. Focusing on the experience of Taiwan’s protected area, geoparks, national parks, we observe the following questions needed to be critically considered and assessed for a better tomorrow:
In today’s environmentally and politically intertwined global world, the success of a Future Earth Coasts/Ocean projects’ practice will not only benefit itself. Through networking and sharing, the significance of geopark’s good practice will be magnified tremendously. We are therefore inviting you to join us for this special conference to share your research results, share your experiences that can shed lights for our common future.
We invite researchers, academics, communities, government authorities and other interest groups to participate in this conference. This event will offer not only an opportunity to exchange ideas and learn from one another, but also a chance to visit various geoparks of Taiwan to gain insights from their practices. A post-conference field trip will visit Penghu Marine geoparks’ natural settings, their cultural activities and handicrafts, and get to taste geo-products.