Background In Lebanon at the start of the project there were 10 Protected Areas covering 7,818 ha representing 0.75% of its land. Lebanon has been designating sites as Protected Areas since the 1930s. The wealth of biodiversity in these areas is attracting ecotourists and thus providing economic benefits as well as representing significant scientific and natural assets. However, the sites had been defined on an ad hoc basis, without national strategic management. Responsibilities for these areas had been split between a number of different national authorities and other stakeholders with no clear or unified rationale or legal criteria. In addition, the PAs largely depended on public funds to support both their conservation and management costs. Laws governing the reserves neither authorized the collection of entrance fees nor granted legal status to the reserves’ committees. This severely limits their capacities to attract funding and sign agreements. Objectives The project aimed to identify and establish a proper, approved, integrated structure for the management of Protected Areas in Lebanon at local and national levels. It planned to develop a National Action Plan for Protected Areas and design a strategy to provide the capacity necessary to sustain the new plans. It also aimed to establish a sustainable financing mechanism and propose a legal structure that would allow the inclusion of private lands as designated Protected Areas. A draft Protected Areas Action Plan would be implemented over a year to test the proposed structures, to gain approval from a broad set of stakeholders and to provide results that could be disseminated. Results The most important output of this project was the creation of the NAPPA (National Action Plan for Protected Areas) which is designed to bring national vision and co-ordination to nature conservation and the management of PAs. It succeeded in establishing clear and defined guidelines for classification of PAs and a set of monitoring and evaluating indicators at site level;the project also raised awareness of all the issues among key stakeholders. Among the project results was the establishment of a sustainable finance strategy, in order to solve the problems of irregular disbursement of funds as well as dependency on government financial support. The project developed a national capacity-building strategy for Protected Areas, along with a set of draft legal texts for strengthening the existing PA management structure. Draft legislation was produced to promote job stability and professional careers in PA management Unfortunately, many of the practical benefits of the project have yet to materialize because legal and institutional reforms identified and drafted within the project still await official approval by the Government. Political unrest and instability in the Lebanon during the duration of the project was partly responsibility for this. The resulting problems for decision-making, legal approvals and public procedures also prevented the possibility of conducting a one-year test of implementation of the NAPPA. Nevertheless, the beneficiary is convinced that the results of the project will enable significant capacity development and be widely disseminated into the future.These results are well shown on the web site of the Ministry for Environment.