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Hands Up for Hygiene! is a teaching manual to help educators introduce good hygiene behaviour in schools in the Pacific. It is designed for a younger audience (upper primary school students), but can be tailored to suit secondary school students and the wider community. The manual guides educators in using the ‘life-skills’ approach, which focuses on teaching knowledge, attitudes and skills that help people take responsibility and develop new behaviours.

Hands up for Hygiene! is a teaching manual to help educators introduce good hygiene behaviour in schools in the Pacific. It is designed for a younger audience (upper primary school students), but can be tailored to suit secondary students and the wider community. The manual guides educators in using the 'life-skills' approach, which focuses on teaching knowledge, attitudes and skills that help people take responsibility and develop new behaviours

Designed for use by community groups, NGOs, government, private enterprises or donor bodies, this guide contains information on the importance of toilets for preventing the spread of disease, the variety of toilet designs and their construction and promotional material,.

Designed for use by community groups, NGOs, government, private enterprises or donor bodies, this guide contains information on the importance of toilets for preventing the spread of disease, the variety of toilet designs and their construction, and promotional materials.

This flipchart is designed for NGOs, community groups and agencies presenting to small groups. It uses strong imagery to highlight why good sanitation is important, what options there are for affordable and appropriate sanitation, and how communities can set up and maintain sanitation enterprises.

The number of reported small Marine Managed Areas (MMAs) driven by local communities has strongly increased in the Pacific region in the last 10 years. They are now presented as on of the main fishery and coastal management tool adapted to the context of many Pacific countries where intervention of the official agency is minimum and where the participation of community is still important.

This report provides an update of all data in TREDS and accommodating the recent data received for 2011-2012 period, during this reporting period (2011 June-2012 September). The tag inventory for Vanuatu records all tags receive form SPREP and details of damage and distribution of tags. The tag inventory records all flipper tags used for turtle monitoring in Vanuatu.

Invasive Alien Species (IAS) are a major threat to marine, freshwater and terrestrial biodiversity of the Pacific islands and to the people there that depend on biodiversity for their livelihoods. Invasive species are implicated in the decline of hundreds of species in the region. Participating Pacific states and the executing agency SPREP (Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme) recognised the need to implement the regional IAS strategy, “Guidelines for Invasive Species Management in the Pacific. A Pacific strategy for managing pests, weeds and other invasive species” (hereafter, the Guidelines) and develop and implement national IAS plans and strategies. The Guidelines were originally identified as a product under this project, but were completed in 2009 prior to writing this proposal. As envisaged during the PIF process the proposed project contributes to the implementation of the Guidelines, each country’s National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan and helps each to meet its responsibilities under Article 8 (h) of the CBD and several other international agreements addressing IAS. The three main components (not including components related to project management) of the proposed project are designed to capture outcomes and outputs described in the Project Identification Form but they have been reorganized to follow the structure of the Guidelines.

Questions: Do past disturbance, soil nutrients, or species diversity predict the invasion success of the alien tree Pittosporum undulatum in an island montane rain forest? What are the consequences of its invasion for forest composition and species diversity? Location: Blue Mountains, Jamaica. Methods: Censuses of trees ? 3 cm DBH in permanent plots in four sites within ca. 7 ha; 1974–2004 (intensive sites) and in 16 plots within 250 ha; 1990–2004 (extensive plots). Results: Pittosporum was unrecorded in the intensive sites before a severe hurricane in 1988: by 2004 all four sites were invaded. Pittosporum had invaded 25% of the extensive plots in 1990 and 69% in 2004, where its basal area increased from 0.5 ± 0.4 (SEM) m2.ha?1 in 1990 to 2.8 ± 1.3 m2.ha?1 in 2004. It had zero stem mortality and diameter growth rate exceeded that of native species fourfold. Pittosporum's basal area in the extensive plots in 2004 was positively related to the stand basal area damaged in the 1988 hurricane and negatively related to soil N concentrations. Pittosporum invasion was unrelated to stand-level tree species diversity in the extensive plots but as its basal area increased over time the basal area of native species and stand-level diversity declined. Conclusions: There are no obvious functional attributes of Pittosporum unrepresented in the native tree flora although it has high photosynthetic efficiency compared with native trees. More widespread invasion of these forests by Pittosporum seems inevitable since hurricanes, which accelerated the invasion, affect these forests frequently.

Disturbances are a primary facilitator of the growth and spread of invasive species. However, the effects of large-scale disturbances, such as hurricanes and tropical storms, on the broad geographic patterns of invasive species growth and spread have not been investigated. We used historical aerial imagery to determine the growth rate of invasive Phragmites australis patches in wetlands along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States. These were relatively undisturbed wetlands where P. australis had room for unrestricted growth. Over the past several decades, invasive P. australis stands expanded in size by 6–35% per year. Based on tropical storm and hurricane activity over that same time period, we found that the frequency of hurricane-force winds explained 81% of the variation in P. australis growth over this broad geographic range. The expansion of P. australis stands was strongly and positively correlated with hurricane frequency. In light of the many climatic models that predict an increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes over the next century, these results suggest a strong link between climate change and species invasion and a challenging future ahead for the management of invasive species.