Environmental Monitoring and Governance
Nauru's Department of Commerce, Industry and Environment along with other key stakeholders are taking steps to be more informed to support environmental planning, forecasting and reporting with the Inform Project Inception Meeting taking place this month.

Timely and high-quality data will help Pacific island countries assess current environmental conditions and take appropriate steps to improve them, as well as monitor any changes over time.

To aid in gathering, interpreting and making such data easily accessible, the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), with funding from the Global Environment Facility and implementation support from UN Environment, established a national database in Nauru from February 7-9, 2018 under the Inform project.

To launch the in-country database, Mr Paul Anderson, the Inform Project Manager of SPREP, and Mr Tony Miller, the Inform Project Systems Analyst, hosted an introductory workshop and sessions with government officials, information technology experts, statisticians and other stakeholders.

                  Bryan-Star copy
Mr Bryan Starr of Nauru at the workshop in Nauru

These database users will have a chance to test the initial database and provide feedback on how it can be tailored to fit Nauru's needs, and the country's information technology capacity also will be assessed during the week.

"The Nauru Environment database will be useful to share information with relevant agencies like statistics, environment and health in a timely fashion. For our team in agriculture, getting access to existing information will allow us to avoid duplication and focus our efforts on community engagement," said Ms Lisa Jacob, Development of Sustainable Agriculture Manager of Nauru.

"We plan on trailing the environment data portal next week during our survey of home gardens. The Ridge to reef project has gathered this data for five districts so by sharing information via the portal we will help complete the national dataset and save time and resources."

Information contained in the database can be used to help create national State of Environment Reports and also report on Multilateral Environmental Agreements, Sustainable Development Goals, and other national and international requirements.

"Input from partners in Nauru is invaluable in scoping and refining the portal development to best serve the people of Nauru," said Mr Anderson.

The four-year Inform project is working in the Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. In addition to creating national databases in all 14 project partner countries, a regional database will be created for countries to access and share environmental data.

To learn more about the Inform project, please visit http://www.sprep.org/inform/home.