Nabilah S
Fourteen countries in the Pacific Islands are working together on a unique application to get a $US70 million grant for fisheries adaptation from the Green Climate Fund.
The proposal is made up of two parts.
They first recognise how the growing number of people in the Pacific affects coastal fisheries and makes it easier to get tuna to make up for the shortage of fish.
And second, to create an early warning system based on better modelling that will help countries in the Pacific better track the way tuna is expected to move east because of climate change.
We’ve been focusing on fisheries and how fishing affects fish stocks for a long time, but now we know that climate also affects what happens to fish stocks. So, we need to talk about this when we talk about managing fisheries,” Kumoru said.
Conservation International is the organisation aiding Pacific countries in gaining access to the Green Climate Fund.
Its senior director, Johann Bell, said that the Green Climate Fund is the best way to get a grant of this size for a project in a regional area.
The GCF will give out grants worth a total of $US70 million. But we also hope to get a lot of money from other sources. So, the total cost of doing this job will be $US120 million over seven years,” Bell said.
“A little more than half of this will go toward strengthening fish aggregating device programs in each of the 14 participating countries, and the rest will develop this early warning system to make it easier to predict how tuna will react to the warming ocean.”
The Green Climate Fund has approved the idea for the application, and now work is being done to put together a funding proposal for the program that will be sent in April 2024.
According to Ludwig Kumoru, the problem now is to persuade the Pacific countries involved to take ownership of the effort and help drive it forward.
It’s important because each country needs to feel like it belongs to them but to do that, they will also have to add to the ideas,” Ludwig Kumoru said.
Because what is being suggested might work differently for some countries. They have a way of doing things, and we must build a relationship with them through consultation. Once we do that, it will be easier for us to carry out this project.
The Fiji, Cook Islands, Marshall Island, Fiji, Kiribati, Niue, Nauru, Palau, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and the Federated States of Micronesia are among the nations taking part in the Green Climate Fund Regional Tuna Programme Proposal.
