Public Awareness Program and Development of Education Toolkit for Green Sea Turtle Conservation in Sarawak, Malaysia

Nobody knows exactly what happened during "the lost years" of the turtles in the wild, thus a green turtle headstarting project was carried out at Pantai Pandan, Lundu, Sarawak, Malaysia from June 2014 until December 2015 to shed some lights on the growth of hatchlings during a small part of their "lost years". As a consequent, opportunity of small scale awareness campaigns on sea turtle conservation arises during this project. Activities include talk related to green turtles conservation, hands on experience on turtle-human interaction (supervised), and documentation via videography. Evaluation on the affective domain among participants on this short program was carried out based on standard structured questionnaires followed by data analysis. A total of 666 people participated in the awareness program from October 2014 to November 2015. Approximately 72.8% of participants had never seen and touched any life turtles thus this program had provided the opportunity to do so in a safe manner. Personal testimonies revealed the 21.2% respondents that have eaten turtle eggs prior to this program said that they will never eat any in the future. Upon completion of this study, participants and local people alike, showed appreciation to the existence of green turtles in Malaysian waters and are very willing to be the sea custodians in the future. A series of brief video with the duration of 2 minutes each, a manual and an information kiosk had been produced, which serves as documentation of the project and to be used in future awareness program.