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The world’s more than 200 000 protected areas come in many forms, on land and at sea, and occur in every country (Bertzky et al. 2012). They are places that people establish to conserve natural and cultural heritage and to sustain their benefits for society. Among other values, protected areas allow people to connect with nature for their inspiration, education, well-being and recreation. While protecting ecosystems that are essential for life, they can support human livelihoods and aspirations and offer nature-based solutions for the complex challenges faced by the world today.

This dissertation examines the relationship between contemporary development projects and the Fijian idea vanua which is commonly translated as “land” but entails meanings of people, community, and custom. Often treated as a rigid cosmological entity with its own cultural order, in this dissertation I argue that when viewed as an environmental framework in which historical actors and ideas are constantly moving in and out, vanua is actually flexible, open-ended, and has the capacity to interact and collaborate with contemporary development projects such as environmental conservation and commercial farming. This capacity is built from the entanglement of diverse historical forces (e.g. indigenous politics, pre-colonial capitalism, colonial policies) which still resonate in the environment today, and is able to affect the realization of the universal values (e.g. environmentalism, development) intended to be introduced. Here I use a small coastal village called Waitabu located on Taveuni Island as the ethnographic setting to demonstrate how these processes are played out.

This State of the Environment (SOE) Report is part of the process of assessing the environmental issues confronting Palau, and will contribute to the development of a National Environmental Management Strategy (NEMS) for the Republic. It was commissioned by the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme for the Government of the Republic of Palau.

The Pacific Islands region is currently experiencing an intensification of interest in culture of an enabler, rather than an inhibitor of development.

Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC)

The State of the Environment (SOE) Report includes all those environmental problems that have been identified to date in Tokelau. This report also serves to illustrate the severity of some of these problems, and how we may expect to resolve them. More specific details of actions which will address these environmental problems are included in the Tokelau Environmental Management Strategy (TEMS)

This Environmental Legislation Review for Tuvalu has been produced as an important component of the National Environmental Management Strategies (NEMS) Project. The NEMS Project was developed to address sustainable environmental development and planning issues in a number of Pacific island countries. It was funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Australian International Development Assistance Bureau (AIDAB) and implemented through the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) as part of a broader UNDP assistance project called PMI: Planning and Implementation of Pacific Regional Environment Programme which concentrates oil regional and in-country institution strengthening and training of environmental managers.