Abstract
The Coral Triangle (CT) is an area encompassing almost four million square miles of ocean and coastal waters in the Southeast Asian and Pacific nations of Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste, called the Coral Triangle 6 (CT6). The area is home to some 363 million people and the biological resources of the CT directly sustain more than 120 million people living within this area and benefit millions more worldwide. The CT is at risk due to a range of factors, including overfishing, destructive fishing practices, land- and ocean-based sources of pollution and climate change. These have a negative impact on food security, employment opportunities and living standards of people dependent on the resources. Further, it is the poor who are most dependent on the threatened marine resources. This document reports on the evaluation of the performance of the United States Coral Triangle Initiative (US CTI) program, as well as on the validity of the foundational assumptions inherent in the US CTI Results Framework (RF). Specifically, the evaluation is designed to investigate the effectiveness of the program's key elements -- the results and intermediate results -- in achieving the strategic objective (SO) of the RF and the Coral Triangle Initiative on coral reefs, fisheries and food security (CTI-CFF) goals. (Excerpt, modified)