Do Pacific Islanders need to do their own EIAs?

We Pacific Islanders (PIs) have been the Professors of Sustainability for over 40,000 years, so just ask us PIs, especially Samoans, if you think you may need some sustainability help.

Allow us to share some public documents, see www.thegef.org, detailing some of the Pacific’s main Country Environmental Priorities, many of them caused by a refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change Impacts and applying it. Now the Pacific is spending 30% of its environmental restoration budget on combating climate change negative impacts, both mitigation and adaptation, amounting to $USD10s of millions regionally wasted.

This is millions of USD that could have been spent on increasing our Pacific sustainable livelihoods and eliminating poverty here in the Pacific. Pacific Islanders are being pushed into poverty more and more, at a time when we should all be alleviating poverty in the world, not causing it.

The current (2008) Federal Labour Govt in Australia is sending not only the Pacific into further poverty by its ongoing poor relationships with Pacific Islanders, but sometimes even causing it with their poor use of taxpayers’ money/aid dollars. I’ll try to explain this comment:

Either Australia is prepared to do EIAs on all its aid projects in the Pacific (an Environmental Impact Assessment tool that gives us all some pertinent knowledge of the positive and negative impacts of a project, and whether the project should proceed or not), and be prepared to do an EIA even once projects have been completed.

You can even do a project EIA during and even AFTER a project, as long as you, as the donor, is prepared to accept all the responsibilities and even learn from it for your other planned/implemented Pacific projects.

Guess we PIs could also do our own EIAs and pass this knowledge on to our donors. Here are just a few areas causing we PIs great concern:

1. RADIATION FALLOUT
We Pacific Islanders have suffered radiation fallouts in the past here in the Pacific, and will continue to suffer from such radiations for many generations to come, albeit Australian, French and/or South African radiations.

2.DEFORESTATION CAUSING POVERTY
Australia, and Australia’s trading partners, Pacific or otherwise, are importing Asian/Pacific rainforests, depleting, non-sustainably, Asia’s and the Pacific’s unique rainforest ecosystems, causing villagers to face poverty head-on.

3. DEFORESTATION CAUSING ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS
Extensive deforestation is affecting water catchments and food supplies. There is now no potable water in some villages, lowered hygiene, no native forest foods where they once belonged, lowered nutrition for some, soil siltation in our coral lagoons, less fish, no oxygen (well, less oxygen), etc.

4. INSUFFICIENT LEGISLATIONS
Australia, and Australia’s trading partners, ONLY need to legislate to help protect Australia’s reputation of this on-going souring relationship with the Pacific and its peoples. Why not legislate about trading with our trade partners who refuse to legislate against importing and even exporting vulnerable Asian and/or Pacific rainforests (about 98% of the Sumatran and Borneo rainforests may be destroyed by 2022 because of expanding logging and palm oil production). Why?

5. NEW CASH CROPS AND CATTLE CAUSING DESTRUCTION
Now PNG and Solomon Islands are planting palm oil. We in Samoa have nearly stopped non-sustainable logging, but not quite. Cattle ranching is now the new cancer with cattle pastures expanding into our few remaining rainforests that we needed for our water catchments, hydro-power, biodiversity conservation, even our own medicinal plants and cultural spirituality.

6. NON-SUSTAINABLE PRACTICES CONDONED. WHY?
We need every Ministry in every Pacific Island Country within the Pacific working collectively towards sustainability, yet we fail (as development partners) to take some obvious and very inexpensive vital development steps. Children are not even being taught sustainability, nor are our Pacific politicians – just look at ALL the non-sustainable practices throughout Australia and the Pacific that are on-going today, with full political support. No wonder the Pacific Youth are annoyed, disillusioned, turning to drugs and choosing suicide instead.

7. 20 SIMPLE POSITIVE STEPS CAN EASILY BE TAKEN
There are 20 obvious environmental management steps that could have been taken over the past 20 years by Australia to help Pacific Island relations, and the same 20 obvious environmental management steps can still be taken over the next 20 weeks or 20 months and even 20 years. Just ask your best Federal Australian Environmental Planners to come-up with this list of 20 FIRST STEPS, and then we’ll show you ours.

8. IS AN APOLOGY DUE? THINK OF THE UNNECESSARY IPACTS TO DATE.
We Pacific Islands also accept apologies, but Australia has never seen fit to offer a National Apology to Oceanic Islanders in total. Oceania now suffers the largest cultural/language extinction rate in the world, many of our 3000 languages are eroding or disappearing/degrading at an alarming rate. And you’ve taken much of our forests as well.

9. 50% PACIFIC BIODIVERSITY ALREADY THREATENED
Bird species in Oceania are facing extinction, in fact, Oceania has the highest extinction rate for avian species in the world (Australia has the highest extinction rate for native mammal and native plant species in the world). Today, 50% of the biological diversity (wildlife) in the Pacific is threatened or extinct. And who cares?

10. PACIFIC CRISES BURGEONING AND BURDENING
A blind eye is being turned to important AIDS/HIV epidemics here in the Pacific. Why? PNG, and may be Bouganville, are facing a crisis handling just one additional disease on-top of an already ailing health system and illiterate education system and agricultural sectors that are starved for sound sustainable advice (excuse all the puns).

11. NON-COMMUNICABLE DISEASES
Obesity and diabetes, and other non-communicable diseases, are also rife now in the Pacific, thanks to poor quality imports and processed foods and introduced non-sustainable lifestyle aspirations. So sweet of you!

12. ADDICTIVE HABITS
Pacific women and children are now taking-up smoking, and even illicit drugs. And who cares? We in the Pacific are now just learning to make the same bad mistakes that have been made overseas.

13. PACIFIC LOSING ITS ROMANCE
And the Kids in the Pacific will soon be another ‘lost generation’ as we Pacific adults destroy the very sanctity of the Pacific that even our visitors are seeking. Even this travel branding with the famous ‘Romance of the South Seas’ slogan is tiring for all us Pacific Islanders. It is certainly not a romantic lifestyle for us anymore.

14. SIMPLE OR COMPLEX ISSUES?
We PIs are really worried about what the rest of the world is doing to assist us. Are we fully aware of this simplicity? I was going to say ‘complexity’, but that’s not exactly correct.

15. GAP BETWEEN RICH AND POOR WIDENING
Mind you in this context, poor political stability is inevitable in the Pacific when rural villagers/different ethnic factions realize that the gap is widening between the rich and the poor, and the struggle from day to day gets harder.

16. MACRO-ECONOMIC REFORMS
We in Samoa have successfully reformed our macro-economic policies, and we now have more villagers electrified than ever before (98%), we have compulsory education until 15 years old, we have an almost free education and medical system, we have one of the world’s highest public transport ratios.

17. CROSS-CULTURAL TRENDS - GOOD AND BAD
We’ve even learnt your language, adopted your dress and belief systems, and even import your foods, so you will feel at home in Samoa. In return, we can teach you to play rugby on our white sandy beaches, if you have the time and the interest.

18. MONEY OR COMMITMENT?
We have enough money from the Global Environment Facility (GEF with its $USD3.3 billion to invest in environmental management globally) (http://gef-passamoa.blogspot.com) as we form a Pacific Alliance of Sustainability (PAS) with those countries that are genuinely interested in not only repairing the damaged livelihoods of we Pacific Islanders, but are prepared to also stop the on-going malpractices and mismanagements of the global environment, and Australia is one of the biggest global environmental offenders.

19. LEVELS OF PACIFIC COMMITMENT?
However, our Pacific brothers and sisters are no exception. Collectively, we in the Pacific need to re-think the GEF Pacific Alliance of Sustainability (PAS). What does it really mean, other than an extra $USD100 million injection of money that may not really change our level of Pacific commitment to truly attaining sustainable livelihoods once again?

20. FOOD SECURITY
Food security is now a major issue for PIs (Pacific Islanders). We PIs are going hungry, starving, malnourished because of disturbed national parks and water catchments with Australian cattle now grazing in them (unbeknown to Australia) and causing leptospirosis, E. coli bacterial infection of the gut, especially our children, and even more impacts on our biodiversity and sustainable livelihood options.

21. CUMULATIVE EFFECTS AND NEW ISSUES LIKE 'CLIMATE HEALTH'
We PIs cannot face the current barrage of environmental mis-managements, let alone as PIs now being asked to face your induced ‘climate health’ issues as well. The first consequence of these added negative impacts on the Pacific and we PIs, many of them caused by poor understanding from Australian decision-makers, means that our health, education and agricultural sectors will now suffer even more so.

22. COST OF IMPLEMENTING ESD
Where is the subject ‘Education for Sustainable Development’? Well, we in the Pacific now have ESD, we have an ESD Framework (Sept 2006 – signed by all our PI Education Ministers), we have an ESD Action Plan (as of February, 2008, again signed by all our PI Education Ministers), but we don’t have the funds to implement it. Do you?

23. WANTED - Sustainable development partners
We PIs are looking for a development partner, a sustainable development partner, one that is interested in Sustainable Development, to be our on-going mentor, re-introducing sustainability and romance back into the Pacific. We all need to take a more holistic and harmonized viewpoint to attaining sustainable livelihoods, after-all, we all now live in the one Global Village.

24. SHARING RESOURCES WORLDWIDE
We PIs are at least prepared to share our Pacific resources with the whole world, but only on one condition: ‘that you share all your resources with us sustainably, and that you allow us to utilize our natural resources equally sustainably’.

So, to answer the question: "Do we PIs need to do our own EIAs?", the answer is "Yes, most likely, as no one else is really interested in these on-going issues in the Pacific. If they were, then they would have taken the necessary precautionary measures by now.

Best we PIs can do is to encourgage a sense of responsibility in all our Pacific aid donors.