Search the SPREP Catalogue

Conservation of biodiversity, improving rural livelihoods and supporting sustainable agriculture are key issues globally, but for many Pacific Island Countries (PICs) key biodiversity reserves are under considerable pressure from clearing and degradation. Rural communities are often put in a situation where clearing of forest margins is undertaken to meet demand for arable land to produce food and generate income. Forest reserves are also degraded by logging, where timber royalties are important in the absence of other sources of income for traditional landowners and communities. Therefore, agroforestry and ecologically based agriculture systems in the forest margins can help to offset reliance on forest degradation and can enhance the buffers around key reserves. Sustainable forest management and ecotourism also need to be maximised to help meet these challenges of generating income whilst maintaining or enhancing biodiversity, conserving soil and water resources.

The international community is increasingly aware of the link between biodiversity and sustainable development and its direct impact on wealth, health and well-being. Biodiversity is the origin of all crops and domesticated livestock. It is also the source of vital ecosystem services and functions, including soil conservation, water cycling, pollination, pest and disease regulation, carbon sequestration and nitrogen fixation. Biodiversity and the ecosystem services it supports are thus key to nutritional diversity and to agricultural productivity and resilience. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 and its 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets provide a framework for countries to develop national targets and policies for sustaining biodiversity for a healthy planet. To meet rising global food demands, agricultural systems need to produce greater quantities of more diverse and nutritious food in a sustainable way. This progress can and must be achieved without driving biodiversity loss. It must come through gains in the efficiency of resource use, through sustainable intensification and a landscape perspective in agricultural production. By contributing to the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, agriculture will be a key driver for eliminating poverty, improving human health and providing energy, food and clean water for all while maintaining natural ecosystems.

Fisheries and aquaculture remain important sources of food, nutrition, income and livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people around the world. World per capita fish supply reached a new record high of 20 kg in 2014, thanks to vigorous growth in aquaculture, which now provides half of all fish for human consumption, and to a slight improvement in the state of certain fish stocks due to improved fisheries management. Moreover, fish continues to be one of the most-traded food commodities worldwide with more than half of fish exports by value originating in developing countries. Recent reports by high-level experts, international organizations, industry and civil society representatives all highlight the tremendous potential of the oceans and inland waters now, and even more so in the future, to contribute significantly to food security and adequate nutrition for a global population expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050.l

Rodents remain one of the most widespread and damaging invasive alien species on islands globally. The current toolbox for insular rodent eradications is reliant on the application of sufficient anticoagulant toxicant into every potential rodent territory across an island. Despite significant advances in the use of these toxicants over recent decades, numerous situations remain where eradication is challenging or not yet feasible. These include islands with significant human populations, unreceptive stakeholder communities, co-occurrence of livestock and domestic animals, or vulnerability of native species. Developments in diverse branches of science, particularly the medical, pharmaceutical, invertebrate pest control, social science, technology and defense fields offer potential insights into the next generation of tools to eradicate rodents from islands. Horizon scanning is a structured process whereby current problems are assessed against potential future solutions. We undertook such an exercise to identify the most promising technologies, techniques and approaches that might be applied to rodent eradications from islands. We highlight a Rattus-specific toxicant, RNA interference as species-specific toxicants, rodenticide research, crab deterrent in baits, prophylactic treatment for protection of non-target species, transgenic rodents, virus vectored immunocontraception, drones, self-resetting traps and toxicant applicators, detection probability models and improved stakeholder community engagement methods. We present a brief description of each method, and discuss its application to rodent eradication on islands, knowledge gaps, challenges, whether it is incremental or transformative in nature and provide a potential timeline for availability. We outline how a combination of new tools may render previously intractable rodent eradication problems feasible.

Rodent eradications undertaken on tropical islands are more likely to fail than eradications undertaken at higher latitudes. We report on 12 independent rodent eradication projects undertaken on tropical islands that utilized the results of an in situ bait availability study prior to eradication to inform, a priori, the bait application rate selected for the eradication. These projects also monitored bait availability during the eradication. The results from our analysis verified the utility of bait availability studies to future rodent eradication campaigns and confirmed the influence of two environmental factors that can affect bait availability over time: precipitation prior to the study and the abundance of land crabs at the study site. Our findings should encourage eradication teams to conduct in-depth assessments of the targeted island prior to project implementation. However, we acknowledge the limitations of such studies (two of the projects we reviewed failed and one removed only one of two rodent species present) and provide guidance on how to interpret the results from a bait availability study in planning an eradication. Study design was inconsistent among the twelve cases we reviewed which limited our analysis. We recommend a more standardized approach for measuring bait availability prior to eradication to provide more robust predictions of the rate at which bait availability will decrease during the eradication and to facilitate future comparisons among projects and islands.

Three-quarters of the Earth's surface is covered by oceans and seas which are an engine for global economic growth and a key source of food security. The global ocean economic activity is estimated to be USD 3-5 trillion. Ninety percent of global trade moves by marine transport. Over 30 percent of global oil and gas produced is extracted offshore. Expanding knowledge of marine biodiversity has provided breakthroughs in sectors such as pharmaceuticals, food production and aquaculture. Over 3.1 billion of the world's population lives within 100 kilometers of the ocean or sea in about 150 coastal and island nations.

At the international level, a number of global instruments provide mechanisms to facilitate addressing today's challenges. Two of which are the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (IT-PGRFA) and it's supporting component, the Global Plan of Action for the Conservation and Sustainable Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (Global Plan of Action), which was adopted by the Pacific Island Countries along with other members of the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (CGRFA) in 1996 through the Leipzig Declaration.