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The first edition of the Newsletter of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas Oceania (WCPA Oceania) for 2020 is now available.

Full Newsletter (Pdf)

This KBA report outlines key recommendations for the Government of Kiribati and its people for protecting its unique biodiversity and supporting sustainable livelihoods. A total of twenty-two island KBAs were identified and suggested for immediate management. Outlined below are the identified KBAs in order of their recommended priority rankings for each island group...The finding of Kiribati's KBA analysis provides a sound link to several significant ongoing and new initiatives within the environment division and at the national level.

Many areas outside national and regional protected area networks also contribute to the effective in-situ conservation of biodiversity. Appropriately recognising, reporting and supporting such areas is increasingly important in the context of biodiversity loss and climate change.

The 9th Pacific Islands Conference on Nature Conservation and Protected Areas held in Suva, Fiji, December 2013 produced and adopted a new Framework for Nature Conservation and Protected Areas in the Pacific Islands Region 2014-2020.

This is the final report prepared by the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) for submission to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Papua New Guinea Conservation and Environment Protection Authority (CEPA) in relation to the 2016–17 assessment of the management effectiveness of Papua New Guinea’s protected areas.

The Cook Islands (CI), South Pacific, has one of the highest ratios of ocean to land area of any ocean island state in the world. Within it's EEZ exist abundant resources of seabed manganese nodules, thought to be the fourth richest resource of its type in the world, with a potential theoretical monetary value of c. $10 trillion US. The largely hydrogenetic nodules are rich in Ti, REE, Mn, Co and Ni. Economic studies suggest that a single twenty year-long mining operation could generate c. 150 jobs directly supporting 15% (c. $43M US) of the CI GDP.

For more than 40 years, marine zoning has played a key role while evolving as part of the adaptive management of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) Marine Park.

Existing marine bioregions covering the Pacific Ocean are conceptualised at spatial scales that are too broad for national marine spatial planning. Here, we developed the first combined oceanic and coastal marine bioregionalisation at national scales, delineating 262 deep-water and 103 reef-associated bioregions across the southwest Pacific. The deep-water bioregions were informed by thirty biophysical environmental variables. For reef-associated environments, records for 806 taxa at 7369 sites were used to predict the probability of observing taxa based on environmental variables.

This report presents the findings of the Final Evaluation of the six year1 Global Environment Facility – Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (GEF-FAO) Forest Protected Area Management (FPAM) in Fiji, Samoa, Vanuatu and Niue project, which was implemented between January 2012 and July 2017. The project’s global environmental objective was ‘to strengthen biodiversity conservation and reduce forest and land degradation’ and the development objective was ‘to enhance the sustainable livelihoods of local communities living in and around protected areas’

We argue that OECMs are essential to the achievement of big and bold conservation targets such as Half-Earth. But integration of OECMs into the conservation estate requires fundamental changes in protected area planning and how the conservation community deals with human rights and social safeguards issues; it therefore challenges our understanding of what constitutes “conservation”. It will only succeed if the key drivers of biodiversity and ecosystem service loss are addressed in the whole planet.