Pacific Islands lead on oA Action

During a COP26 side event hosted at the Moana Blue Pacific Pavilion on November 5, partners from Tokelau, New Zealand and Samoa described Pacific Island leadership to advance tangible actions that protect her communities by better understanding and addressing local impacts of OA through adaptation and resilience building projects.

Tokelau is one of the partners of the New Zealand-Pacific Partnership on Ocean Acidification (NZ PPOA) launched during the Third Global Conference on the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) held in Samoa in 2014. The goal of the Partnership is to advance science and understanding of OA, as well as deploy community-led resilience building strategies in areas of most concern.

During an event held on November 9 at the UN SDG Pavilion, partners from SPREP and Pacific Community presented on monitoring work being led through PI-TOA, a Pacific regional hub of the Global Ocean Acidification Observing Network, and further elaborated on plans to open an OA Regional Training Hub in partnership with The Ocean Foundation and U.S. NOAA that would further expand capacity for OA science, research and response strategies.

The OA Alliance partnered with the NZ PPOA to produce a policy support document, “Mainstreaming OA Into National Policies: A Handbook for Pacific Islands” in 2019 which was featured at events across COP26.