Day 2

Protected areas are progressively being recognised and, of particular importance, widely accepted internationally regionally and nationally as an essential part of the global response to ecosystem and biodiversity loss, climate change, and their related impacts and consequences.

This Parallel Session has been formulated to focus on a number of questions such as how well planned and managed marine and terrestrial protected areas can address ecosystem and biodiversity loss, enhance ecological, social, and economic resilience to climate change, protect natural carbon reservoirs, and respond to national and local development needs such as food security, depleted water resources, disaster risk reduction, and marine and coastal management.

The session will also provide up-to-date information on the CBD LifeWeb Initiative that facilitates financing for biodiversity conservation including guidance for countries to prepare Expressions of Interest and information for how donors can benefit from the service provided and participate in donor roundtables that has been successfully utilized in a number of countries.

Complementing the natural solutions and funding elements will be a presentation that will clearly demonstrate how the various pieces of a complex planning and funding match matrix can be drawn together by applying the Open Standards for Conservation Action and the relatively recent adaptations that had been done in Australia to introduce participatory community-based approaches and suggestions on how these could be adapted to the Pacific Island context.

These presentations will be followed by a facilitated open forum discussion. The objective of this will be to identify the critical elements of best practice in protected area decision making that can be applied to support the adoption of progressiveimplementation of ecosystem-based climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies.

The parallel sessions will present best management practices, lessons learned, successes, from the five ADB Coral Triangle in the Pacific in Timor, PNG, Vanuatu, Solomon Island and Fiji in Coastal Management. The session will also include some lessons and best practice from other initiatives such as Locally Managed Marine Areas Network, CTSP and CT6 projects, Micronesia Challenge, sustainable financing mechanism for coastal development and resource economics and governance exchanges.It will also include input from other regional experts and roundtable working groups and partners. This will also provide opportunity to link the ADB/CTI program of work to other regional strategies and program of work such as SPREP Strategic Plan, Action Strategy Nature Conservation and Protected Areas in the Pacific Islands Region. The forum will provide wider dissemination of the ADB/CTI BMPs and lessons learning to be disseminated to other non-Pacific CTI countries.

The seminar will present UNEP’s Medium Term Strategy 2014-2017 and strategic framework for the Pacific, with a particular focus on ecosystem management as well as ecosystem approaches for climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction. UNEP's work will be illustrated through presentations on relevant initiatives, including Island Ecosystem Management, an approach for development of integrated management systems that operate at the scale at which biological, social and physical processes and threats occur on islands; as well as Pacific Island Disaster Risk Reduction; Asia Pacific Adaptation Network and the Adaptation Knowledge Platform. The session will seek to enhance how these activities respond to Pacific needs and priorities, including by forging and strengthening collaborative partnerships with Pacific SIDS, and support preparations for the Third International Conference on Small Island Developing States in September 2014.

The Pacific Mangroves Initiative (PMI) is an umbrella partnership co-chaired by IUCN and SPREP that supports mangrove-related activities across the Pacific strengthening the conservation of mangroves and coastal zone management while ensuring the sustainability of livelihoods of the local communities. The PMI includes partners that are working on mangroves and associated coastal ecosystems namely USP, WWF, UNDP and the governments of several Pacific Island countries. The session will feature presentations from the two projects currently under the PMI: Mangrove Ecosystems for Climate Change Adaptation & Livelihoods (MESCAL) and Mangrove Restoration for Sustainably-managed Healthy Forests (MARSH). Presentations will focus on some of the key outputs of the MESCAL project such as mangrove mapping in Solomon Islands and Fiji, the revised National Mangrove Management Plan for Fiji, total Carbon assessment of Rewa Mangrove system-Fiji, the co-management plan developed for Le Asaga Bay, Samoa and the economic valuation of the ecosystem services and goods of its mangroves. There will also be a presentation on work achieved to date in PNG by the MARSH Project and a presentation on wetlands by SPREP. The session will conclude with a moderated discussion on further collaborative opportunities under the PMI.

The exceptionally diverse social-ecological systems across Melanesia appear to exhibit a high-degree of resilience to varied social and environmental perturbations that have likely characterized the region for millennia. Despite rapid globalization, shifting climates, as well as changing ocean processes and local ecologies, inherent resilience exhibited by these systems offers a springboard for discussion and synthesis. This Parallel Session seeks to address questions that highlight common threads, trade-offs, and some of the unanticipated outcomes that are likely to characterize continued persistence of interwoven ecological and human well-being in Melanesia.

This Parallel Session will pull together aspects of resilience from a number of projects in the Solomon Islands and determine key actions for engendering resilient social and ecological systems in the Melanesian customary land and sea context. Following a series of presentations, a workshop will draw on participant experience and knowledge in order to identify shared themes around the challenges of creating resilience and provide some key recommendations for developing resilience in the Solomon Islands and Melanesia broadly. While geographically focused, participants from across the Pacific are encouraged to join this discussion in order to identify key themes applicable across Oceania.

Every region of Oceania reveals unique strategies for resilience in the face rapid globalisation, shifting climate, changing ocean processes and invasive organisms. The socio-ecological diversity of this expansive land and seascape can be used to further enhance community and environmental resilience during an increasingly unsettled era. By exploring aspects of community resilience in Melanesia, and particularly the Solomon Islands, this parallel session aims to uncover common threads and trade-offs in areas of capacity building and skill utilisation, adaptive resource management and governance, biodiversity conservation, invasive species, and education and identity.
We will determine key actions for engendering resilient social and ecological systems in Melanesia, while expanding on these for broader and distant regions. Initial presentations will create a launch pad for workshops and discussions to develop these actions; participants from across Oceania are encouraged to contribute to all aspects of the session.  We embrace innovative input, where unexpected outcomes are often those that work best.

Climate change and natural disasters threaten the economic, social, and cultural wellbeing of people across the Pacific. For example, extreme weather and sea-level rise will prove disastrous to coastal residents and to all people on low-lying atolls, so many Pacific governments are seeking ways to mitigate the risk of climate-induced disasters.

Policy makers choose from a variety of options for mitigating the impacts of climate change and natural disasters, including soft infrastructure, hard infrastructure, and ecosystem-based adaptation. Often, however, these decisions are ad hoc or based on incomplete knowledge of the relative costs and benefits of alternatives.

In this session, we evaluate the cost effectiveness and social preferences for infrastructure development and ecosystem-based adaptation using case studies derived from across the Pacific. Cost-benefit analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and multi-criteria analysis are all used to set priorities for at-risk communities. Lessons learned and “best practices” will be emphasized throughout the presentations.

This session will increase participants/attendees understanding of marine spatial planning approaches, tools and applications, and to share lessons learned and best practices. It will provide the opportunity to discuss how marine spatial planning efforts have been done in the region, their applicability across different Pacific Island countries, and nuances in spatial planning process that are specific to the Pacific region. This session will also help identify what are the real challenges or 'stumbling blocks' to achieving marine spatial planning at scale, and potential solutions on how to both scale up and scale down exisiting and future efforts. We hope to attract high caliber speakers that will be useful technical people that participants can network with and learn from. The session will contribute to the theme of conference of finding natural solutions for the sustainable development challenges we face in our region, and will contribute strategies outlined in the Pacific oceanscape framework.