The South China Sea Project: a multilateral marine and coastal area management initiative

摘要

Since its creation in 1990, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) has invested in excess of one billion US dollars in projects related to "international waters". In the context of the GEF, the term "international waters" has a meaning very different from the legal context of the UN Law of the Sea, where international waters are deemed to be those areas of the world's oceans that lie beyond national jurisdiction. International waters in the GEF sense includes transboundary water bodies, i.e., those areas of fresh and marine waters that are shared by more than one state. During the pilot phase of the GEF from 1990 to 1994, investments were limited to a few very large projects implemented by UNDP and the World Bank. One such project in China was to build port reception facilities for ballast water and oily wastes that was implemented in parallel with a world-bank loan to develop these same ports. The use of GEF funds as supplements to World-Bank loans was heavily criticised in the independent evaluation of the pilot phase. During subsequent phases of the GEF there has been a tendency to move away from such large investment projects and, in 1996, the GEF and its three implementing Agencies (UNDP, UNEP and the World Bank) developed three operational programmes within which future GEF interventions in international waters were supposed to fit.