A delegation of five representatives from the Republic of Vanuatu landed in Quito on 5 May 2026 with a policy challenge shared by many small island nations across the planet: How do you build a durable, operational conservation finance system that outlasts political cycles, earns community trust, and actually works on the ground?

The Vanuatu–Galápagos Knowledge Exchange, facilitated under the NBSAP Accelerator Partnership and its Facilitator Programme, brought together two island governments with globally significant biodiversity, shared island vulnerabilities, and a commitment to conservation. 

The Galápagos demonstrated that biodiversity finance is not simply about raising revenue. It is about creating the governance, legal, scientific, and community foundations that allow conservation investments to deliver lasting results.

Vanuatu is recognised as a global biodiversity hotspot, with ecosystems that support unique species, customary livelihoods, cultural identity, and national resilience. Through its revised NBSAP 2026–2030, the country has set ambitious priorities for ecosystem conservation, invasive species management, restoration, and community-based stewardship of natural resources.

Yet translating these commitments into lasting action presents a unique challenge. In Vanuatu, the vast majority of land and much of the coastal environment are under customary ownership and management. Communities and traditional leaders are therefore not only beneficiaries of conservation efforts, but also the primary custodians responsible for protecting biodiversity through Community Conservation Areas and other customary management systems.

For this reason, biodiversity finance in Vanuatu must do more than generate revenue. Any financing mechanism must be designed to visibly support local communities, strengthen customary stewardship, and provide practical resources for conservation management, monitoring, enforcement, and sustainable livelihoods. Without tangible local benefits, long-term conservation outcomes are difficult to sustain.

The shared question going into the exchange was therefore broader than how to establish a green levy. It was about designing a conservation financing system that can generate reliable resources, earn community trust, support customary conservation efforts, and remain effective over the long term. The Galápagos offered an opportunity to see how financing, governance, and community benefits can be brought together within a single, enduring system.

The Exchange was designed to advance Vanuatu’s biodiversity financing roadmap under its revised National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) for 2026–2030 and contributes to the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. The journey unfolded in two phases. The first brought the delegation into dialogue with national institutions and Galápagos authorities to understand the systems level, while the second shifted to the ground level, engaging civil society, fisheries cooperatives, tourism operators, and local communities to see those mechanisms in practice across the Galapagos Islands. South–South peer learning offered a faster, more grounded path to these lessons. 

The delegation brought together representatives from Vanuatu’s climate, environment, tourism, and conservation institutions, alongside the NBSAP Accelerator Partnership’s regional facilitator.

This included Chester Takau (Finance Manager at Vanuatu’s Ministry of Climate Change Adaptation and lead on conservation finance and BIOFIN processes), Tom Maimai (Senior Compliance Officer at the Ministry of Climate Change Adaptation), Dean Wotlolan (Senior Conservation Area Officer at the Department of Environmental Protection and Conservation), Jennifer Joe (Senior Business Development Officer at the Department of Tourism), and Adrien Moineau (Regional Facilitator under the NBSAP Accelerator Partnership).

The group discovered important lessons in whole-of-government and whole-of-society transformation and the power of south-south exchange. For Vanuatu, the Galápagos model demonstrated that advancing its Green Levy under its NBSAP framework requires moving simultaneously and coherently on governance architecture, legal foundations, community benefit-sharing, and operational capacity to create a mutually reinforcing system.

The knowledge exchange began in Quito, Ecuador with a session hosted by Milton Ordoñez, Under Secretary of Natural Heritage, and Andres Factos, Ecuador’s National Focal Point to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The meeting set the stage for Ecuador’s approach to biodiversity finance in the Galápagos, which is embedded within national development planning and fiscal architecture. That integration is what gives it durability.

The Quito meetings provided the national policy context. The delegation then travelled to the Galápagos Islands to see how those policies and financing mechanisms operate on the ground. Upon arrival in the Galápagos Islands, the delegation engaged directly with the Galápagos National Park Directorate (DPNG), under the leadership of Director Lorena Katherine Sánchez Saritama. Her team’s technical expertise and logistical support were central to the mission’s depth and coherence, and her welcome to the delegation reflected the broader global relevance of island-led conservation governance and the importance of sharing practical experience between countries facing similar environmental vulnerabilities. 

During the initial meeting, the delegation learned about and engaged with the three flagship mechanisms that keep one of the world’s most iconic ecosystems funded:  

The Green Levy: The National Park Entrance Fee system converts tourism revenue into earmarked conservation financing. Visitors payments flow to protected area management, biosecurity, environmental monitoring, and community infrastructure. The delegation explored how revenues are allocated, how transparency is maintained, and how the system manages tourism flows through instruments like the Transit Control Card to mitigate ecological pressures.

The Galápagos Life Fund (GLF): Established through a debt-for-nature swap, the GLF channels long-term financing into marine conservation and climate resilience, governed through robust fiduciary frameworks that extend well beyond any single political administration. For Vanuatu, this opened thinking about how domestic green levy design might eventually be complemented by debt conversion mechanisms or other international financing approaches that generate long-term financing streams dedicated to marine conservation, biodiversity protection, and climate resilience. 

The Invasive Species Fund (FEIG): The FEIG is a targeted trust-fund model dedicated to one of the island’s greatest threats: invasive alien species. The FEIG funds prevention, monitoring, eradication, and scientific response, and its governance structure ensures continuity and technical oversight independent of annual budget cycles. The resonance for Vanuatu was important as the islands are experiencing growing invasive species that are an underfinanced threat to biodiversity, food systems, and ecological resilience.

Across all three, a common pattern emerged: Financing mechanisms that work do so because they are embedded in strong legal frameworks, governed by clearly defined institutions with real mandates, and held accountable through transparent systems that communities can see and trust.

For Chester Takau, Finance Manager at Vanuatu’s Ministry of Climate Change Adaptation, seeing the system in action made the logic clear: 

The exchange’s most vivid days were its most grounded. On the Island of Santa Cruz, the delegation visited operational sites and territories, including monitoring centres, fisheries docks, community farms, and municipal offices, to see where governance meets livelihood.

First, the delegation visited two operational sites that brought the DPNG’s conservation work to life. At the DPNG Monitoring Centre, the delegation observed how vessel monitoring systems, fisheries surveillance technology, marine reserve delimitation, and tourism vessel route tracking are used to enforce compliance and protect the marine reserve in real time. The visit demonstrated how conservation financing translates into operational enforcement capacity. 

At the Turtle Route Nursery, the team saw giant turtle rehabilitation systems, nesting and nursery management, and species reintroduction programmes in action, illustrating how conservation finance supports long-term ecosystem restoration and species recovery well beyond what policy frameworks alone can achieve.

The COPAHISA Fisheries Cooperative from Isabela Island visited the delegation on Santa Cruz Island, to share about GLF-supported initiatives supporting 180 cooperative members, including rehabilitating cold storage infrastructure, formalizing value chains, and strengthening fisheries governance. The cooperative model shows how conservation finance can reinforce sustainable marine resource management while directly supporting local economies, reinforcing long-term social and political support.

At the Municipal Government of Santa Cruz, Hilton Aguas, Director of Planning, walked the delegation through how protected area entry fee revenues are redistributed to fund municipal services, waste management, community infrastructure, and environmental services. The message was simple and practical: Communities accept conservation levies when they can see the benefits directly. 

Foundation ECOS, led by CEO and Founder Ana Maria Loose, presented two flagship programmes supported through the GLF: Contextualised educational interventions for biosecurity awareness in the Galápagos and the “Guardians of Galápagos Marine Life” citizen science initiative. The Foundation emphasized that long-term conservation outcomes require not just funding and regulation, but public understanding, social participation, and local ownership. 

At Rancho El Manzanillo and Finca La Envidia, the delegation saw community-based agro-tourism models that diversify rural livelihoods while promoting sustainable land use and environmental education, including immersive coffee-harvesting experiences that connect visitors directly to conservation values. These examples illustrated how green economy strategies can integrate ecotourism, agroforestry, and cultural heritage into a coherent approach to sustainable development.

Some of the most important learning came not from the mechanisms themselves, but from the enabling conditions and actions that make them possible. These levers are what the NBSAP Accelerator Partnership has begun calling accelerants: high-leverage actions that unlock faster, more effective implementation.

Building institutional coordination across sectors: The Galápagos conservation model works because it coordinates across environment, finance, tourism, biosecurity, fisheries, and territorial planning. Sessions with the Governing Council of the Special Regime of Galápagos (CGREG), the Biosecurity Agency (ABG), and the Galápagos National Park Directorate (DPNG) illustrated how clearly defined institutional mandates and legal frameworks, strong political commitment, and structured inter-agency collaboration are prerequisites for effective biodiversity finance implementation.

Exploring the science-policy-management interface: The delegation’s visit to the Charles Darwin Foundation Research Station, led by Director of Science Maria Jose Paladim, revealed how the Galápagos conservation model is driven by long-term scientific investment. The Charles Darwin Foundation is not merely an academic institution, it is a strategic technical partner to the DPNG, informing invasive species strategies, restoration priorities, marine conservation planning, and climate resilience assessments. The FEIG finances science-based projects managed by the Foundation. For Vanuatu, this underscored the need for its future biodiversity finance mechanisms to fund not just enforcement and infrastructure, but research capacity, ecological monitoring, and evidence-based decision-making.

Setting legal frameworks that protect and enable: During a visit with the Governor of Galapagos Islands, Carlos Ortega, from the Governing Council of the Special Regime of Galapagos the delegation learned about the Special Regime Law of the Galápagos Province. This Regime Law provides constitutional protection for the ecosystem and creates the differentiated governance architecture that allows the system to function at scale. Mariel Celi, Director of Legal Affairs at the DPNG, walked the delegation through how legal clarity on jurisdiction, competences, and sanctioning regimes makes biodiversity finance mechanisms stick. For Vanuatu, this underscored that biodiversity finance development is not only a financial design challenge, but a legal and institutional one.

Reinvesting biodiversity finance in communities: The exchange highlighted that tourism operators, fisheries cooperatives, municipal governments, and farmers are not merely peripheral stakeholders. They are the operational backbone of the system. When conservation finance reaches communities visibly and equitably, it earns the social license that sustains it. When it does not, it erodes. This was the defining lesson from the Galápagos: the visibility of reinvestment in community is as powerful as any legal framework.

Integrating biodiversity finance within national tourism: A final and underappreciated accelerant emerged from the closing session with Felipe Alava Riofrio, Director of Island Region at Ecuador’s Ministry of Production, Foreign Trade and Investments. His presentation on tourism statistics, visitor management, and national policy coordination reinforced that biodiversity finance cannot succeed as a purely environmental agenda. It must be integrated into national tourism policy, economic planning, and territorial governance frameworks. For Vanuatu, this means that Green Levy development is not solely a task for the environment ministry — it requires active engagement from finance, tourism, and economic planning institutions from the outset.

Perhaps the most important insight the exchange produced was about the exchange itself.

The Galápagos model was not transferred to Vanuatu through a report or a technical assistance mission. It was transmitted through direct institutional relationships, field visits, shared discussions, and conversations between practitioners who have navigated the same tensions between conservation objectives and community needs, environmental ambition and fiscal reality.

This is what South–South cooperation enables that conventional technical assistance cannot: grounded, peer-to-peer learning between countries that share comparable contexts, constraints, and aspirations. The NBSAP Accelerator Partnership’s Facilitator Programme made this exchange about connecting with not just the institutions, but the people behind them.

The relationships formed between the Vanuatu delegation and the Galápagos National Park Directorate, the Charles Darwin Foundation, CGREG, and community stakeholders are themselves accelerants for action. They are the foundation for continued collaboration, policy dialogue, and future technical partnerships that extend well beyond the ten days of the mission.

The mission report is clear that this exchange is a beginning, not an endpoint. The development of Vanuatu’s national Green Levy will require a phased, coordinated process: continued technical analysis through BIOFIN, stakeholder consultations, institutional design work, legal assessment, and policy alignment across ministries. The Galápagos provided a living proof of concept and a set of hard-won lessons to adapt.

The central lesson Vanuatu carried home was simple: biodiversity finance works best when governance, science, finance, enforcement, and community benefits are designed to work together.

As a symbolic gesture on 13 May 2026, the Vanuatu delegation and staff of the Galápagos National Park planted a tree together in the park’s reforestation site. The native seedling sits in soil planted between two archipelagos, representing a partnership that both nations intend to grow.