As there were larger and fruitful discussions about how to proceed in this COVID19 situation and how some active actions would need to be rethought to reach results in a non-presential way of proceeding, the MBPC project split this steering committee meeting into two online sessions.

Concrete campaigns to disseminate some of the project’s results, not only from this second phase, but also from PANACeA (first phase), centered part of the debate, with some modular projects having already achieved key accomplishments concerning the main topics in the community such as marine litter, global changes or the latests efforts to enhance marine protected area (MPA) management. The project partners looked into the main events to be organized and targeted by the project including workshops on transboundary governance, a case study in the Adriatic-Ionian region, capacity building for MPAs in Montenegro, a training school co-organized with the BlueMed initiative, the Mediterranean MPA Forum in Monaco, the EU Green Week or the IUCN World Conservation Congress in January 2021, among others.

For both the MBPC initiative and the community of projects, Transferability, Capacity Building and Capitalisation events are key in this second phase, accompanied and aligned with a strong and transversal communication strategy and enhanced coordination within the community members.

This second virtual steering committee meeting served to review the management, organization, development and communication actions planned to better explain the MBPC commitments, share accomplished achievements and propose a calendar for joint actions aiming to increase the impact of biodiversity protection projects towards common identified strategic targets within our Community of 15 projects engaged and beyond. The members agreed on reviewing the developments, commitments and exchange views and mechanisms for a better understanding among partners and cross cutting communications in the project.

The partnership is made of ETC-UMA (lead partner), CPRM, Plan Bleu, MedCities (communication leader), Latte Creative, the Ministry of Sustainable Development and Tourism from Montenegro and the Marine Institute Croatia. All together, the MBPC is made of 342 partners from 239 institutions from 24 countries, 18 of them in the Mediterranean. The community is also present in the southern and eastern shore of the Mediterranean through their associated partners in Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia and Turkey.