14 July 2015: The 18th Annual Meeting of the Pacific Islands Roundtable for Nature Conservation (PIRT) discussed the implementation of the Framework for Nature Conservation and Protected Areas (PAs) across the Pacific region.

Participants at the PIRT meeting mapped PIRT members’ current and future activities and projects against the Framework’s objectives to identify progress and gaps in the Framework’s regional implementation as well as in implementation of global targets such as the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) Aichi Biodiversity Targets. PIRT also focused on financing to support the Framework’s implementation and the role of conservation in achieving sustainable development.

PIRT aims to support biodiversity and conservation action by improving collaboration and coordination among organizations working on nature conservation in the Pacific. Several organizations signed PIRT Membership Agreements at the meeting, including the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF Pacific), The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the Society for Conservation Biology (Oceania) (SCBO) Inc., the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Oceania Regional Office (ORO), SeaWeb and the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP). SPREP organized the meeting, which convened from 9-10 July and was preceded by the PIRT Protected Areas (PAs) Working Group and the Pacific Islands Species Forum.

Also in July, SPREP along with Reef Ecologic, an Australian environmental consulting agency, supported the participation of five coral reef managers from the Pacific in a three week Coral Reef Management Fellowship programme at the Great Barrier Reef, Australia. The training was designed to train future leaders in coral reef conservation and marine resource management.

The five Pacific managers from Kiribati, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu, joined seven participants from the Caribbean and Indian Ocean regions for the course, which focused on coral reef management, science and leadership. They discussed topics such as carbon storage and biofuel, habitat protection, renewable energy and weather stations as well as threats to coral reefs such as from Crown of Thorns starfish, agricultural run-off and development. They visited reef-associated operations in Port Douglas and Townsville, Australia, including research stations, government departments, schools and farms. [SPREP Press Release 14 July] [SPREP Press Release 13 July]