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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 book aims to introduce readers to some significant areas of ‘modernisation inspired’ legal changes or challenges that are currently being faced by Pacific island countries. These challenges are largely arising because of tensions between the legal,political and social systems introduced by various colonial powers and the legal,political and social systems of indigenous cultures. It may seem that indigenous cultures are becoming obsolete, a piece of tradition that, increasingly, belongs in the past. From such a viewpoint introduced systems must ultimately prevail in order that Pacific island nations are able to ‘progress’ and to participate in the global economy.Such a picture, though, rests on a static concept of culture which fails to realise that cultures adapt to change and that the meeting of different cultures is a catalyst for change in all of them. Throughout the Pacific these different systems are currently struggling to find ways to co-exist, to adjust to and accommodate each other. The aim of this struggle is to realise systems that are both reflective of culture and allow for participation in the modern global environment

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.

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 meeting was attended by 19 participants and an additional participant made a skype presentation from his home base in Apia. Included in the group were FAO technical staff from the Sub-regional Office for the Pacific Islands (SAP) and from Rome, representatives of the regional technical agency – Secretariat of the Pacific Community, country representatives from Ministries of Agriculture and National Statistics offices, private sector consultants and the Head of the Coordination Unit for the EU funded All ACP Commodities Programme (AAACP) from Brussels (participants list is attached at Annex 2).

Social and biophysical dimensions of ecosystems are inextricably related such that a change in one dimension is highly likely to generate a change in the other. Although change is a natural consequence of complex interactions, it must be monitored and even managed if the rate and direction of change threatens to undermine system resilience.

Humans and other species rely upon natural ecosystem processes and ecosystem services for their very survival. As the human population has grown, overuse or misuse of the environment and impairment of its ability to provide ecosystems services have led to shortages in critical human and other species needs. The last 10 years have seen an increase in the awareness of and interest in the complex interactions among population, health and the environment (PHE) and even more recently, an increase in awareness of linkages between HIV/AIDS and the environment, which could be considered as a subfield under the umbrella of PHE. Recent studies have brought to light a series of interacting and complex relationships, many with negative feedback loops, between HIV/AIDS and the environment. A comprehensive examination of these relationships and analyses of the quality and breadth of the evidence are lacking. We undertook a broad review of the published literature regarding the potential links between HIV/AIDS and the environment to assess the evidence for these connections and to provide guidance for possible next steps in addressing them through basic or operations research and intervention.

The biological diversity of the 72% of our planet covered by seawater is crucial to global resource security, ecosystem function and climate dynamics. We know little of the extent and the interactions of marine biological diversity but in all of the UNEP Regional Seas changes in biodiversity are the symptom of failures to manage marine ecosystems.

How clean are Samoa's natural resources, including its air, rainforests, potable water supplies, coral lagoons and farming lands? How healthy are its people and its ecosystems? And how can we better measure the success of our national environmental and development policies and programmes which are being designed to better protect both the health and the environment of all licing things, especially with people as the central focus? Also how important is climate health to us all in the context of growing climate change impacts on Samoa, and especially with rising global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the highest being recorded in 2006?