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Opening Remarks; Pacific Preparatory Meeting of the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD Pre-COP16). Attending the pre-COP are representatives from: 14 PICs from environment departments, as well as agriculture, fisheries and forestry – in person; Australia and New Zealand as metropolitan SPREP members – in person, PIRT partners including TNC, CI, WWF, Island Conservation -in person and virtual; and One CROP – SPC, SPREP and OPOC – in person and virtual And input from a few additional partners including FAO (in-person), and virtually from UNEP; SCBD, GLISAP, and University of NSW. Acknowledge financial support for pre-COP and COP from NZ MFAT under the CC grant. Collaboration with FAO to engage agriculture sector for this meeting, and for input into mainstreaming biodiversity into agriculture sector. Support also from SPREP’s and FAO ACP MEA3 project.

It is a privilege to acknowledge the generous assistance and contribution of the Government of the People’s Republic of China to SPREP.

While some people might remember it for its Hollywood association, the small uninhabited islands has other claims to fame. In 2011 the island's Indigenous owners - the village of Yanuya and a consortium of partners led by the National Trust of Fiji and a local NGO, Maregeti Viti successfully removed invasive rats and goats from Monuriki to protect its critically endangered endemic Fijian crested iguana.

There is a growing recognition that conservation strategies should be designed accounting for cross-realm connections, such as freshwater connections to land and sea, to ensure effectiveness of marine spatial protection and minimize perverse outcomes of changing land-use. Yet, examples of integration across realms are relatively scarce, with most targeting priorities in a single realm, such as marine or freshwater, while minimizing threats originating in terrestrial ecosystems. To date, no study has optimized priorities across multiple realms to produce a spatially explicit integrated conservation plan that simultaneously accounts for multiple human activities at a national scale. This represents a major gap in the application of existing cross-realm planning theory. We present a national scale conservation framework for selecting protected areas using a case study of Papua New Guinea (PNG) that integrates multiple systems and ecological connectivity to account for cross-realm benefits and minimize threats of land-use and climate change. The relative importance of both the forests and inshore reef environments to PNG subsistence and commercial livelihoods emphasizes the importance of considering the connections between the land and sea. The plan was commissioned by the PNG Conservation and Environment Protection Authority and identifies a comprehensive set of priorities that meet conservation targets in both the land and sea. Our national-scale prioritization framework is useful for agencies and managers looking to implement actions given multiple objectives, including watershed management and biodiversity protection, and ensures actions are efficient and effective across the land and sea.

We report three major and confronting environmental issues that have received little attention and require urgent action. First, we review the evidence that future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its lifeform including humanity is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts. Second we ask what political or economic system, or leadership, is prepared ti handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such actions. Third, this dire situation places as extraordinary responsibility on scientists to speak out candidly and accurately when engaging with government, business and the public.

Assisting the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme's (SPREP) island members to plan, prepare and respond to marine spills is one of the four activity areas of the Pacific Ocean Pollution Prevention Programme (PACPOL). PACPOL activities currently include a regional risk assessment regional and national contingency plans, formulation of a regional equipment strategy and facilitating regular workshop to discuss marine spill issues. The aim of this initial shipping risk study was to identify and quantify the shipping routes, frequency of voyages and types of cargoes transported in the region as well as to map shipping incidents, navigational hazards and assess the risk of marine pollution across the region, EEZs and at a port scale. The regional and EEZ distribution of risk potential showed clusters of high risk in Fiji, French Polynesia, Papua New Guinea and Solomon Islands. Smaller clusters occurred in Tonga, the Samoa's, Vanuatu and the corridor from Chuuk northward past Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. Another potential marine pollution risk for the Pacific is the fuel oil and cargoes remaining on WWII shipwrecks deteriorating in the waters of the region. More than 1000 such wrecks have been identified amounting to over 3 million tons of shipping lost.