Cultural uniqueness, caring and sharing

Frank A. Campbell
Terii Simpson tells herself that “a clean and safe environment has to start with me.” The highly respected “Mama Terii” persuades a community in the Cook Islands to change age-old water-use habits and let conservation start with them.

Efforts to save land crabs in Vanuatu’s Crab Bay get a boost when a local drama group incorporates the story of the crab into its performances. And a little green bag achieves mind-boggling success in cleaning up the community of Bikenibeu West in the Kiribati capital of South Tarawa.

“Very worthy community projects,” you say, “though not worth a thought beyond the next village or the next town.” But, not so fast. The article you’re reading shows how these projects are producing benefits of significance to today’s global village.

Even if the only result was to help the countries involved to survive and thrive during the 21st century, that would represent a benefit to the world. After all, the islands of the Pacific are stewards, on behalf of all nations, over a sixth of the earth’s surface located in the world’s largest ocean. This despite the fact that these Pacific people are few, poor for the most part, and so scattered that often some have hastened to tomorrow while others linger in today.

The projects are among 13 community-level pilot initiatives undertaken through the US$8.5 million International Waters Project (IWP) financed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF). IWP is implemented under the guidance of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), one of GEF’s three Implementing Agencies. It is one way in which the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) improves and protects the environment of the Pacific Islands.

Former IWP Director Andrew Wright believes that potentially one of the project’s most important global benefits would be to make the islands “less reliant on the international community to deal with their environmental problems and more reliant on internal means of support”. Similarly, Padma Lal, Sustainable Development Adviser at the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, feels that one of the global benefits arising from IWP can be a greater resilience with which to face global warming, sea-level rise and other calamities.

Each pilot requires the IWP National Coordinator, working with specially selected Champions and community-level project committees, to identify the root causes—social, economic, ecological, etc.—behind the problem being addressed.

SPREP Director Asterio Takesy said some time ago: “If we continue to ignore the root causes of our environmental problems, then our environment, natural resources, public health, tourism and economic well-being will continue to be put at risk.”

In the Cook Islands, an IWP study has revealed that pollution of freshwater sources by animal and human waste leads to skin and intestinal disease, and may also be costing the economy up to NZ$7.4 million per year, about NZ$2900 per household. The root cause was identified as uncontrolled human and animal activities in the water-catchment area.

The Cook Islands pilot project helps to raise awareness and develop a freshwater-management plan in the pilot community of Takuvaine. Animals no longer roam freely and movement by tourists and locals alike is restricted in the catchment area.

“Also,” says Taurika Raea, the Cook Islands National Coordinator, “water-quality testing has begun. We’re hoping that a year or two down the road, you’ll begin to see some improvement in the water quality.”

People like Raea and Mama Terii are focused on the problems facing their community and country. But, like the proverbial butterfly making an impact miles away by the flapping of its wings, they and others may be proving that not even a Pacific island is “an island entire unto itself.”

The waste problems on the Marshall Islands often mirror those facing Kiribati and other atolls. Interestingly, seven of the 13 participating countries—Kiribati, Palau, the Marshall Islands, Tonga, Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Tuvalu—have chosen waste as the problem to attack in their pilot projects.

According to Takesy, “With the help of projects such as IWP, we are now successfully working as a region towards implementing social, economic and regulatory reforms to try and remove the ugly and unnecessary stain of waste from the very fabric of Pacific life.”

Kiribati’s Greenbag project includes a creative version of the user-pay principle. Residents of Bikenibeu West must pay for the Greenbags in which to place their garbage. They find it infinitely more economical to separate recycling materials (plastics, etc.) and organic waste, such as tree leaves and plants, than to buy Greenbags to dispose of this useful material.

“During October and November 2005,” according to an IWP workshop report, “more than three tons of landfill rubbish was safely disposed of in landfill sites. Composting is also on the increase with 120 households in Bikenibeu West now either using banana circles (simple low-technology organic composting bins) or traditional ‘banana patch’ composting.”

A project evaluation by Alice Leney found that household waste to landfill had decreased by about 60% in the two-year period ending December 2005. Not only was this figure achieved a year ahead of schedule, but it was three times the 20% target.

Greenbag use can therefore reduce the need for landfill space by about 60% and avoid some A$100,000 in landfill costs per year. The use of such analytical tools, possibly a lasting impact of IWP, attracts regional interest.

An economic study highlighted losses sustained by Cook Islands families, and the risks facing businesses, as a result of pollution. This led Cook Islands business leaders to set up a committee to minimise pollution.

“So the Cook Islands valuation,” wrote outgoing IWP natural resource economist Paula Holland, “actually got people to do something because they could see that environmental protection was genuinely in their interest, and not some abstract concept that only rich people could afford to worry about.”

New Zealand expressed interest in supporting applications from the Cook Islands to address some of the recommendations of the valuation study. Instead of resisting proposals to do evaluation studies, countries now request them.

The Palau IWP pilot has led to the designation of waste as one of the five national priorities, the incorporation of “waste management courses” into the school curriculum and the compilation of a national integrated solid-waste management plan. The project, together with the Office of the President, is helping to launch a Micronesian sub-regional initiative that pilots the recycling of scrap metals. Success could lead to the recycling of car tyres and batteries.

The waste-management pilot in Fiji may also have something to teach other countries. Thanks largely to the project, all 52 households in the pilot villages of Vunisinu and Nalase are separating rubbish from recyclable material; 46 of the 52 are composting. No longer do villagers use mangroves and river banks as dumping grounds. And attractive composting toilets built in Vunisinu by Fiji Institute of Applied Sciences have villagers clamouring for composting toilets of their own.

UNDP-GEF Principal International Waters Advisor Dr. Andrew Hudson paid tribute on Radio Australia to the achievements in managing freshwater, waste and the “shared fish stocks of the Pacific”. He said lessons from the Pacific project might be adopted in the Caribbean. Meanwhile, an expert mid-term evaluation by Peter Hunnam and Cedric Schuster concluded that “the International Waters Project is an important and highly relevant initiative for the Pacific islands region and in terms of potential global benefits.”

One explanation for the success of individual pilot projects is the work of New Zealand communications expert Steve Menzies in equipping project leaders to communicate with their communities. This communications work is also one of the most spectacular global contributions by the project.

Janot-Reine Mendler de Suarez, Deputy Director of the International Waters Learning Exchange and Resource Network (IW: LEARN) recalled Menzies’ initiative, through IW: LEARN’s Inter-Project Exchange programme, to team up with another International Waters project so he could garner ideas for the benefit of IWP. Links were established, principally with the much larger Danube Regional Project. But, Mendler said, “we found that the Europeans could learn as much from the Pacific Islanders as the islanders could learn from them.”

After an IW: LEARN workshop in Vienna Austria, of which IWP was a principal organiser, IWP’s plan to produce a manual ballooned into what is now a manual likely to become the bible for communications and other professionals on IWP projects worldwide.

And photographs commissioned by the IWP to “put a human face” on the problems and responses have been exhibited at environmental fora in Austria, France and Canada. Each time, the photos were a hit. Each time, they generated suggestions that such visual evidence of achievements in environmental protection should form part of the fare at all such international meetings.

GEF senior adviser, Al Duda has his own ideas on how the Pacific Islands have made a major contribution “at the level of the GEF’s International Waters portfolio”. This portfolio has involved US$900 million in GEF grants and an additional US$3 billion in co-financing for 110 projects over a 14-year period.

A basic methodology in GEF’s IW projects is the development of strategic action programmes (SAPs). Part of the Pacific’s main benefit from and contribution to the GEF portfolio comes from being part of the first group of GEF projects to produce SAPs. The Pacific SAP, says Al Duda, sets the stage for the future of the GEF IW portfolio.

Speaking of the transformation noticed during his visit to Majuro in the Marshall Islands, Duda, based at the GEF headquarters in the US, said some communities that had previously been “terribly littered” were, as a result of the project, “very clean, cleaner than Washington, D.C.” These coastal resources management initiatives are related to the welfare of peoples and countries who, one might say, stand on guard over the world’s last remaining major tuna fishery for the good of the global family. Tuna, of course, is only part of the biological riches of the Pacific. The 1000 people in the 11 villages of Crab Bay, a community on the island of Malekula in Vanuatu, saw their crab population increase after the project succeeded in getting them to respect their elders’ previously ignored “No Fishing, No Entry” rules. The Crab Bay initiative produced enough success to encourage other villages to establish their own “taboos” (restrictions in time or space) to protect their crab populations.

An additional benefit has been the protection of species of regional and even global significance. These include turtles and dugongs.

IWP Project Manager, Muliagatele Joe Reti notes that tracking studies show turtles travelling between Samoa and Papua New Guinea, some 4000 kilometres apart.

The dugong is a rare, internationally endangered species, itself the only living member of the Dugongidae family of marine mammals.

According to Nimoho, “We are beginning to see dugongs in the area.” She adds: “The mangrove ecosystem, which was not well managed in the past, is now protected not only for Crab Bay but for Vanuatu and the region. Crab Bay has one of the largest mangrove areas in the country and in the region.”

Perhaps, in the end, the best gift that Pacific islanders offer the world is themselves. This includes the gift of a history that predates that of Germanic or Slavic Europeans or that of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, as then SPREP Director Tamari’i Tutangata noted in an article in the UNEP publication Our Planet.

In her speech to the January 2005 SIDS conference in Mauritius, then New Zealand Environment Minister, Marian Hobbs said: “A rational economist might argue that the world cannot afford these vulnerable communities and small economies. But that would be to ignore the rich culture, philosophy, histories and learning that have evolved in these small islands states. If we value economically the potential of biodiversity, then we should be applying the same economic values to human diversity. The diverse island cultures are rich [They] are worth their weight in gold.”

The Pacific Islands’ gift of cultural uniqueness, according to the Forum’s Lal, is evident in the dance, the music, the handicraft and the diminishing but by no means dead “Pacific way of living, that unique sense of a lot of community caring and sharing”. The region can also offer the gift of a clean conscience when it comes to the preservation of the tuna fisheries in good ecological condition and to their minimal contribution to global warming and sea-level rise.

As Takesy said in a recent interview: “The Pacific Islands might not have much say in rising water levels or global warming. But they can take control of things that make a difference to their health, income and environment. In this way, they...provide an example...to the rest of the world.”