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Four (4) years ago, Wallis and Futuna's Territorial Environment Service embarked on an ambitious journey to remove rats from the islets within the Uvea Lagoon. After completing the required training, community consultations and planning requirements, 4 islets were baited by hand and 9 islets were baited by drone. These islets are now safer for native biodiversity, allowing nature to restore itself and ultimately enhancing resilience against climate change. The healthy islets will be more productive, with more fruit, more crabs, less mosquitoes and more sea birds. This will have positive impacts on the surrounding coastal ecosystem such as reefs and fisheries, which communities rely on. These operations were part of the European Union funded PROTEGE project.

The Solomon Islands State of Environment (SoE) Report presents an overview across seven thematic areas: (culture and heritage, atmosphere and climate, coastal and marine, freshwater resources, land, biodiversity and built environment). This report is based on quantitative data relating to the state of environmental supplemented by stakeholders input to describe casual relationships and environmental effects.

Nous formons un groupe diversifié dans la région du Pacifique, qui s’étend sur environ un tiers de la surface de la Terre et englobe près de la moitié des mers de la planète

This booklet is part of the Wakatu Fiji campaign, which was launched to encourage and empower people to better care for the land and sea that has been taken care of us.

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.

The tree provides heavy shade. Leaves and nut oil are used in traditional Samoan medicine.

The bark and leaves of this shrub are used in traditional Samoan medicines.

The Work Programme and Budget (WP&B) is prepared in accordance with the requirements of the SPREP Financial Regulations and is expressed in USD. The Secretariat proposes a balanced budget of anticipated income and expenditure of USD$22,377,880. The format for the 2014 WP & B is aligned to the priorities of the new Strategic Plan 2011-2015. However, it maintains features of the SPREP budget summary format which lists the budget for each target and links the sources of funding to the core and programme budget components.

Since 2010, Pacific Island Countries (PICs) have taken steps to develop and implement an integrated action plan, or Joint National Action Plan (JNAP), for climate change (CC) and disaster risk management (DRM). Tonga was the first country to develop its JNAP and to get government approval in July 2010, with several other PICs following suit. The development of a JNAP has been encouraged and facilitated by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) and the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC) through its Applied Geosciences Division (SOPAC) and multilateral and bilateral development partners such as the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), GIZ and the Government of Australia. Countries have also made efforts to systematically implement their JNAPs by accessing domestic resources and financial resources available through bilateral and multilateral Official Development Assistance (ODA) and climate change finances (CCF). The purpose of this report is to review the JNAP development and implementation process, and assess lessons learnt for future JNAPs in the region. The review focuses on the Cook Islands and Tonga, which have made progress in implementing their JNAP strategies. These countries obtained support from development partners for JNAP implementation. The review also included Tuvalu, which has completed development of its JNAP with Government endorsement, and countries currently in the process of developing their JNAP – Kiribati, Nauru, Niue and the Republic of Marshall Islands. Reference is also made to other countries such as Palau, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, which chose alternative paths to their integration of CC and DRM.