Search the SPREP Catalogue

A speech by the Minister for Climate Change New Zealand, honorable James Shaw during COP 15 in 2022 declared his support on any and all efforts to scale up the management of Invasive species. This is critical as a key action for increasing the climate resilience of Pacific Islands.

At the COP 27 on 12 November 2022, the management of invasive species was discussed as a key action for increasing the resilience in the Pacific Island nations. Featuring David Eades, Climate change evokes passion, anger, but it also encourages human ingenuity problem solving. Invasive species management is one really good example of that because it makes Pacific Island states that much more resilient to climate change. Invasive species don't allow systems to be in good health if you look around the Pacific there's a lot of impacts from invasive species that don't allow our ecosystems and Islands to function the way that they usually would have I would I would encourage the other small island states in the Pacific and throughout the world to consider because these are the stresses that we have to remove from the equation to be able to combat the climate change when we link it to the climate change and disaster

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.

PACC reports

Reports from the PACC project

Technical report