(Just Part 1) The Quiet Crisis: Pacific Islands Under Environmental Pressure (Ofeira Faasau-Morjaan)

Описание: In Part 1 of our conversation, Ofeira Faasau-Morjaan describes the biggest environmental issues facing Pacific island countries, ranging from climate change to urbanization.

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The Pacific as a region has had its share of environmental issues. As someone from Samoa who helps monitor and evaluate the health of communities across the region, Ofeira Faasau-Morjaan explains the unique environmental issues small island countries experience and provides a vision for what proper care or stewardship of people’s homes would look like. She highlights how rapid urbanization and development projects, often built without proper environmental considerations, contribute to coastal degradation, water pollution, and deforestation, and how climate change is changing the weather and ocean systems of these islands. We need to be particularly concerned about how these issues seem to hurt the vulnerable, both human and nonhuman.

In addition to discussing each of the major issues impacting these communities, she talks about what works and doesn’t work in the Pacific to address and prepare for these problems, and how other parts of the world often contribute to the problem and what people there can do to be a part of the solution. The Pacific island countries are unique in experiencing many of the worst impacts of environmental degradation while also having low populations that do not have the personnel and infrastructure to address them. She explains how the best thing others from other countries can do is help give the technology necessary to help those from these countries monitor the environment on their own. Local solutions built by and focused around the needs of local communities will be the best way to undo the harms we have had in this region.

Links mentioned:

Her LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ofeira-fa...
Secretary of the Pacific website: https://www.sprep.org/
Pacfici Region Infrastructure Facility: https://www.theprif.org/

Recent project where she drafted a proposal to the UNDP for the construction of a walkway through the mangroves to be used by our village families in 2017. The old stone walkway they had been using for over a decade was flooded. This same walkway and mangrove area was visited by King Charles last year during the CHOGM meeting:
https://www.sprep.org/news/project-to... and https://www.samoaobserver.ws/category...