Pacific Adaptation to Climate Change

Pacific Adaptation Climate Change Project learns technical aspects

10/22/2009

The Pacific Adaptation to Climate Change (PACC) project has completed a one week technical workshop. The gathering brought together all national coordinators overseeing the adaptation project to learn more about the processes involved in the multi million dollar regional project.

PACC carries out projects in 13 different countries to help communities adapt to climate change in three major areas; food security, water and coastal management. Each of the different countries will be allocated funding from the USD13.125 million dollars to carry out their country projects. Yet as part of the funding requirements there are certain processes that must be followed.

The main areas within these processes are mainstreaming and vulnerability and adaptation assessments. As part of the PACC project, coordinators must work to ensure that climate change is considered in all levels of national policy. They must also conduct a vulnerability and adaptation assessment in order to have a better understanding of how the adverse effects of climate change will be reduced in communities.

“A lot of our PACC coordinators are very new to the issue of climate change thus we are being put in a situation here where we need to build their capacity to understand the issue first before helping them understand the processes required to implement the PACC project,” said Taito Nakalevu the Coordinator of the Pacific wide project.

Partnerships have been formed between the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) and many different organisations in order to help develop the PACC successfully in different countries.

Several of the organisations include the University of the South Pacific PACE that assisted in delivering the vulnerability and adaptation assessment training and will follow up that capacity building through short courses. Other partners include agencies such as the Secretariat of the Pacific Community through support on food security projects, as well as SOPAC who are providing assistance on coastal management. The University of Hawaii’s Dr. Cheryl Anderson also assisted during the training in the area of socioeconomics.

“I think a lot of the PACC coordinators found the one week workshop useful but some have also said they are overwhelmed as it is still a new process to them. We will be guiding them through this with bilateral visits and meetings as well as another meeting of all PACC Coordinators in April.”

The PACC Technical Meeting was held on the 5-9th October in partnership with USP PACE, Institute of Applied Sciences Conference Room, University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji.

The PACC is funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as its implementing agency and the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) as implementing partner.

 

Contact Name:	Taito Nakalevu
E-mail:	taiton@sprep.org
Phone:	(685) 21929
Fax:	(685) 20231