NEWSPAGE 19 October
2011

(Photos: 4pr)

(Photo: Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme)

SAMOA: Pacific Emerging Environmental Leaders’ symposium starts in Apia
Source: Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme Press Release
 
The Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) is hosting its first symposium for young professionals who are emerging as environmental leaders in the Pacific islands.

The Symposium, being held in Apia, Samoa from 16-20 October, was officially opened this morning by SPREP Director-General, David Sheppard.

Twenty young Pacific Islanders, hailing from a diverse range of professions, are participating in the Symposium, which will set the stage for the Pacific Emerging Environment Leaders’ (PEEL) Initiative, a longer-term programme aimed at supporting action by young professionals for environmental management and leadership.

Mr. Sheppard congratulated participants on their selection and highlighted the value of young minds in developing innovative solutions to today’s problems. He made reference to the Pacific’s “youth bulge” and noted that in the region, the age group of 15-29 years accounts for a third of the working age population.

“You are arguably the most important sector of the populations, particularly as you move into leadership positions in our Pacific countries over the next few years,” he said.

“You are the ones who will be influencing and setting policy which will determine how well our environment is managed in the future.”

The Director-General referred to pressing issues in the Pacific region, which included biodiversity, waste management and climate change as an environmental issues cutting across all sectors. He observed the range of different work sectors from which participants hailed and stressed that this bode well for addressing environment in a multi-sectoral manner.

The 20 participants to the week-long Symposium were selected from over 100 applications received from across the Pacific islands region. Seema Deo, SPREP’s Education and Communications Adviser, and organiser of the initiative, explained that participants were selected on the basis of drive, commitment, ability to nurture the growth of others and on their written vision statements.

“All applicants were of an exceptionally high calibre, which made the selection process a challenge for the four-person panel,” she said. “We are however, confident that we have a dynamic, self-motivated group, capable of thinking beyond barriers and who can contribute to good decision-making that integrates environmental thinking in the development framework.”

“We also hope to be in a position to engage those who missed out on this Symposium through an electronic forum and, potentially, through face-to-face interactions as the PEEL gains momentum.”

The Symposium participants have a wide range of interests, including energy, health, marine conservation and agriculture and come from media, government, civil society and the private sector. They will spend the week developing leadership skills, identifying clear pathways for action and developing a framework for a capacity building programme for young professionals in the region.

Photo Caption: Participants of the PEEL Symposium.
 

(Photos: Office of Congressman Faleomavaega)

AMERICAN SAMOA: ASDHSS Adoption Unit receives "Adoption Excellence Award"

Congressman Faleomavaega has announced that the Adoption Unit of the American Samoa Department of Human and Social Services (ASDHSS) was recognized at the 2011 Adoption Excellence Awards Ceremony in Arlington, Virginia.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (DHHS) Administration for Children, Youth and Families (ACYF) Children’s Bureau, the ceremony honored a total of 18 recipients from across the nation. The American Samoa program was recognized specifically under the category entitled “Support for Adoptive Families” for their unique skills and professionalism to integrate national adoption program requirements with Samoan cultural protocol while defraying the cost of the adoption process to families.

Accepting the award were Senator Fonoti Tafa’ifa Aufata (District 8, Tualauta County) and Celestine Faumuina-Nix, Manager for the Child Welfare and Family Advocacy Branch and the Adoption Unit within ASDHSS. Senator Fonoti, Chair of the Senate Committee on Human Resources and Human Social Services nominated the Adoption Unit for this prestigious award.

The Adoption Excellence Awards were established by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 1997 as a way of recognizing outstanding accomplishments in achieving permanency for America’s children waiting in foster care.

The awards honor states, local agencies, private organizations, courts, businesses, individuals and families who are making key contributions to increasing the number of children from the foster care system who are adopted or placed in other permanent homes. Selection criteria include innovation, uniqueness, overall impact, demonstrated benefits, use of resources, community outreach/involvement, collaboration, sustainability, and ability to replicate.

“I offer my congratulations to the Adoption Unit of the American Samoa Department of Human and Social Services on this distinguished national recognition. I am proud to say that out of 18 recipients for the entire nation, our small island territory was recognized and also the only territory represented among the 2011 awardees,” Congressman Faleomavaega stated.

“Adoption within families is a natural aspect of our fa’a Samoa, and in providing support for adoptive families, the Adoption Unit has successfully overcome the challenge of merging our Samoan cultural practices with national adoption program standards, legal requirements, and procedures. With cultural and family values that make foster care very rare, American Samoa serves as a model to families and state agencies across the country, where foster care is often the immediate and only remedy.”

“I commend Celestine Faumuina-Nix and her staff at the Child Welfare and Family Advocacy Branch for their dedicated service to adoptive families in American Samoa. The Branch is the only adoption agency on island, handling all guardianship and adoption cases including home studies, background checks, reports for the court, and preparation for the families and children. Furthermore, the Branch has worked to successfully reduce the completion time for the adoption process in American Samoa from 2 years to 6 months. I have learned that Mrs. Faumuina-Nix was also recently nominated by Governor Togiola for the DHHS Administration for Children, Youth and Families (ACYF) Commissioner’s Award and I commend her for her dedication to this field. I also acknowledge ASDHSS Director, Leilua Stevenson, and Social Services Division Assistant Director Lupe Fiso for their guidance and leadership for our social services programs.”

“I also extend my deep gratitude to Senator Fonoti for nominating the Adoption Unit and bringing national attention to American Samoa’s successes and needs in this field. I thank our local leaders, particularly Senate President Gaoteote along with Senator Fonoti and her colleagues in the Senate Committee on Human and Social Services for their advocacy and leadership on behalf of the adoptive children and families in our homeland.”

“Lastly, I thank Secretary Kathleen Sebelius of the US Department of Health and Human Services for her leadership and the Administration for Children, Youth and Families (ACYF) Children’s Bureau for all the hard work they do to support adoption programs, children, and families throughout the nation. I was pleased to be able to coordinate a meeting at my office between representatives of the ACYF, Senator Fonoti, and Mrs. Faumuina-Nix to discuss federal resources for American Samoa’s adoption programs. Going forward, I am hopeful that the continued dialogue will lead to increased federal support for adoptive families in American Samoa,” Congressman Faleomavaega concluded.

Photo Captions:

Photo 1 - (L-R) LaChundra Lindsey and Acting Commissioner Joe Bock of the Children’s Bureau/ACYF, DHHS present the Adoption Excellence Award to Senator Fonoti and Celestine Faumuina-Nix.

Photo 2 - (L-R) ACYF Senior Policy Advisor Heidi McIntosh and Legislative Counsel Jason Wittermen meet with Senator Fonoti and Celestine Faumuina-Nix at Congressman Faleomavaega’s Washington office.

(Photos: Pacific Islands Applied GeoScience Commission)

FIJI: SOPAC start six day meeting in Nadi
Source: Pacific Islands Applied GeoScience Commission Press Release

Scientists from around the Pacific have joined 22 member countries and territories of the SOPAC Division of the Secretariat of the South Pacific (SPC) in a six-day meeting being held in Nadi from October 17-22.

This is SOPAC’s first meeting as a Division since it became a part of SPC in January of this year.

“This is an opportunity to review the progress and directions of the SOPAC Division Work Programme, and to stimulate and plan new, emerging initiatives needed in the region,” said Dr. Russell Howorth, SOPAC’s Director.

In addition to the member countries, advisors from supporting governments, organisations and institutions are attending.

SOPAC’s Science Technology and Resources Network (STAR) is an integral part of the meeting with three days of presentations that examine regional concerns such as earthquakes, tsunamis, flooding, climate change, and seabed minerals.

The overall theme of the conference is “Adapting to Climate and Environmental Change in the Pacific Islands.” Professor John Cullen, of the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences from Victoria University is chairing the STAR presentation days.

Among those from the Pacific Islands making presentations are Esline Garaebiti, Manager Vanuatu’s Meteorology and Geohazards Department; Litia Biukoto, Advisor - Hazards Assessment Programme, SOPAC; Paul Taumoepeau, Tonga Nautilius Country Manager; Edwin Liava’a, Database GIS Specialist, Pacific Hycos, SOPAC.

Photo Captions: Regional scientists participating in the meeting; (L-R) Paul Taumoepeau, Esline Garaebiti and Litia Biukoto.

(Photo: Alastair Grant / Associated Press)

TUVALU: Tuvalu drought could be dry run for dealing with climate change
Source: The Guardian
 

A light, taunting shower of rain fell in Funafuti recently. It lasted minutes, with the slightest film of moisture quickly burned away by the bright sun, dashing the hopes of this crowded, parched atoll.

Funafuti and the other eight tiny islands that comprise the Pacific nation of Tuvalu, home to slightly more than 10,000 people, have not seen substantial rainfall since last November.

The government, which declared a state of emergency at the end of last month, says the dry spell is unlikely to break until January.

The drought is chiefly attributed to La Niña, the climate phenomenon which unleashes extreme weather across large parts of the Pacific region.

But the crisis has also been linked to climate change, with rising sea levels imperilling the islands' freshwater lens - the layer found beneath coral islands - and leaving many Tuvaluans anxious over the viability of their country.

Climate change is part of the curriculum at Nauti primary school, where the subject has an obvious resonance. "The pupils talk about it and we discuss it and what it means," says the headteacher, Fanoiga Falasa.

The view among the students is that man-made climate change is testing the tenability of the country, says Falasa, sitting in his office on the edge of the school's large courtyard.

In better years a playing field would grow there; today it is a square of desert, all dust and clumps of arid lawn.

"Some of them are happy, thinking [climate change] might lead to an overseas trip," he says. "Some of them feel sad because they might lose their identity, their culture, their home."

Do they feel angry? "In some ways, yes, because of the bigger countries and what they contribute to climate change. We are a small country, and we are the ones who suffer."

He adds: "I would be very sad if we had to leave our country. Our ancestors are here. We would lose a lot."

The highest point on Tuvalu, which lies halfway between Australia and Hawaii, is less than five metres above sea level. Most of it is less than a metre above. From the air Funafuti appears as a sliver of unattached coastline. The atoll curls around a large lagoon, the widest stretch from one coast to the other measuring barely 400 metres. There are no streams or rivers. The land, unsuitable for farming, allows few crops to grow.

There is very little room for error. Should sea levels rise this beautiful, tiny country - the land area of all nine islands combined is 26 sq km (10 sq miles), 15 times smaller than the Isle of Wight - will become uninhabitable, swallowed whole by the Pacific Ocean.

In the memorable words of Saufatu Sapo'aga, a former Tuvaluan prime minister, climate change for this country is "no different to a slow and insidious form of terrorism".

The big powers have left their mark on Tuvalu in other ways, too. The massive airstrip that runs the spine of Funafuti is out of all proportion to the land that surrounds it. The runway, built in the second world war by US forces, used materials from a series of "borrow pits" dug deep into the earth, puncturing the freshwater lens. The pits remain open wounds, filled with a useless mix of natural water, salt water and piles of waste. On the water's edge are dozens of misshapen shacks that house the country's poorest people: a toxic, dystopian contortion of an island paradise.

Around the corner from the primary school the Tuvalu hospital is limiting admissions to try to cope with the water rationing. Its taps ran dry last Wednesday, and emergency reserves were called in from the temporary desalination plant installed early that week by the New Zealand Defence Force as part of a response co-ordinated with an Australian contingent and the Red Cross.

The hospital faced an outbreak of gastroenteritis two weeks ago, and it is prepared for a spate of waterborne diseases, says Dr Puakena Boreham. "It is not a public health crisis at the moment, but it will be if it gets worse," she says.

"We expect there may be skin problems soon, because people are not bathing as usual."

Sitting on a wooden bench in the hospital reception room, a pregnant Fakatau Teulub is waiting for her seven-month checkup. It will be her fourth child. It is "hard, very hard" for her household to get by on the ration of two buckets of water a day, she says.

In temperatures of around 30C, 40 litres is barely enough for drinking and cooking for Teulub, her children and her husband, a fisherman. Hardly a drop is left for bathing, for washing clothes and dishes. The family's livestock, two pigs and two chickens, go thirsty.

Teulub would emigrate in a heartbeat, she says. "We're dying to move, but we don't have the money."

Roy Lameko, 62, has seen droughts come and go, but "nothing as bad as this". He, his wife and son have not washed clothes for weeks. They all bathe in the sea. "We keep a cup of water to rinse afterwards."

Lameko, who is hanging pieces of tuna to dry on a washing line outside his house, says that with the few crops the islands rely on - coconuts, breadfruit and pulaka (or swamp taro) - failing, people are being forced to dig into any savings to purchase expensive imported foods.

Lameko has two other children, both of whom live in Auckland and who send money back monthly to Tuvalu. Will they return? "I don't know. They want us to go there, but the problem is money," Lameko says and laughs. "That's our only problem: money and water."

The Tuvalu government has long called for industrialised countries to drastically curb carbon emissions, and to compensate parts of the world that are bearing the brunt of climate change.

Like the equally low-lying Maldives in the Indian Ocean, Tuvalu is a symbol of the human price of climate change. Tuvalu's 2008 environment act obliges ministries to "raise the level of understanding throughout the world about the implications of climate change".

"We believe that this [current crisis] is indeed the facts of climate change," Pusinelli Laafai, chairman of Tuvalu's national disaster committee, tells journalists who travelled to Tuvalu aboard an NZ Defence Force aircraft carrying aid. "We think [industrialised countries] have an obligation to help us, if not to restore what was damaged or taken away, at least to assist us in some sense, to mitigate the effects of what they have done," he says. "That is what we ask."

Laafai is confident, however, that the nation-state will not come to an end or have to relocate. "In the long term we will stay here I think," he says. "And we will try to cope. We'll manage somehow, even if it's difficult and expensive."

Over at the water distribution point next to the government-owned desalination plant, Nelly Semiola says he is going nowhere, although he understands that many of his friends and compatriots want to escape the droughts, remoteness, poverty and fragility.

"I want my life to be here," he says. "I grew up here. I got married here. So if what's coming is coming, that's OK. If we survive, we survive. If we die, we die."


Dotcom economy

Tuvalu's GDP is so tiny - about $37m (£23m) - that a line item on the budget measures the sale of national stamps and coins to collectors.

But that income has been boosted by a digital windfall, thanks to the .tv top-level domain name it controls thanks to its name ("Tuvalu" translates as "group of eight", the number of inhabited islands).

Royalties from the sale of the domain name, which by 2010 was used by about 110,000 sites, could reap Tuvalu as much as $40m over a decade.

Funds largely paid for the 2002 tar-sealing and lighting of the roads on Funafuti but the investment has been criticised by some as contributing to the water problem, because of the lack of drainage from the roads.

Laafai, who is also permanent secretary for home affairs, says the benefits of the sealed road outweighed any drawbacks.

Photo Caption: Students queue to buy drinks in recycled bottles at Nauti primary school in Funafuti, Tuvalu.

WORLDWIDE: People make their voices heard on poverty alleviation
Source: United Nations Development Programme Press Release

Personal stories of overcoming poverty and seeing the world through a poor person’s eyes were just two of the highlights of the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

University students, academics, and the civil society implementing poverty alleviation programmes were part of an advocacy event organized by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the University of the South Pacific (USP) Students Association to mark the importance of continuing efforts to eradicate poverty.

The Vice Chancellor and President of the University, Professor Rajesh Chandra, in welcoming guests to the event said he was pleased to see USP and UNDP actively working together following a memorandum of understanding signed between the two organisations earlier this year.

“Today we celebrate the voices of young people through UNDP’s partnership with USP,” said the UNDP Pacific Center Manager Garry Wiseman, as he delivered the opening remarks.

He said that UNDP’s schools outreach visit conducted in the Western Division last week with the reigning Miss Sugar Renee Duguivalu advocated for the involvement of young people in poverty alleviation.

Miss Duguivalu also spoke today and highlighted how the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) complemented each other in the fight against poverty.

USP students who were shortlisted in an essay competition on how to achieve poverty eradication sustainably in the Pacific presented on their essays. First year Bachelor of Arts student Musarat Natasha Begg won the first prize in the essay competition. Her essay focused on education as a sustainable means of poverty alleviation.

Renowned poverty alleviation advocate Father Kevin Barr urged people to “make friends with the poor and see society and its injustice through their eyes.”

In her message for the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty UNDP Administrator Helen Clark highlighted that investing in sustainable development was no longer a question of choice, but was the only option.

“By committing to action on sustainable development, we can tackle the many challenges our world faces - economic crises, climate change, ecosystem decline, continued energy poverty, and conflict and despair in many places,” she said.