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Sandoval, Northeast Palawan

Our pilot MPA project, strengthening a network of eight community-led MPAs on the coast of Palawan.

  • 8 MPAs across Shark Fin Bay and Taytay Bay
  • Gold-level Blue Park Award (2025) for the 9 km² five-MPA core
  • 2027 OMPP field deployment with the Sulubaai Foundation
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Sandoval sits on the northeast coast of Palawan, in one of the Philippines' richest marine seascapes. In 2016, a single 40-hectare MPA was designated around Pangatalan Island. Through community-led consultations and village votes, that has grown into a network of eight MPAs across Shark Fin Bay and Taytay Bay, whose five-MPA core covers 9 km² and earned a gold-level Blue Park Award in 2025. The Sulubaai Foundation has spent 15 years building the local trust behind this network, and has strong momentum to designate more MPAs along the wider Palawan coast before 2030.
A conservation opportunity that combines biodiversity significance, community readiness, government alignment, and urgency.
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Why Sandoval matters for hyperlocal MPA protection

The site encapsulates the hyperlocal challenges our framework is designed to address:

  • Constrained budgets limiting the tools available to community-led MPAs,

  • Fragmented data that does not reach the fishers, rangers, and local leaders who manage the sites,

  • Enforcement gaps in areas exposed to illegal fishing and shifting climate pressures.

OMPP is working with the Sulubaai Foundation to close these gaps, bringing a bespoke technology suite (NASA, Allen Coral Atlas, WHOI, WRI, EarthRanger, Skylight, SMART, Global Fishing Watch) and a local-language community app to the Sandoval MPA network.

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On the ground

The OMPP team has been working with the Sulubaai Foundation since March 2026 to scope the pilot, meeting community leaders and rangers.

In March 2027, the team returns to Sandoval for three weeks of workshops, fieldwork, and the setup of a centralised operations hub at Pangatalan Island.