28 April 2023, Nadi Fiji - Helping our Pacific Islands to strengthen their climate resilience with safe water access in rural areas was at the focus of a second training workshop for participants from Fiji, Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea.
The “Strengthening Climate resilience and safe water access in rural areas in the Pacific” training was held in person in Nadi, Fiji from 17 to 21 April.
The training is a follow up from the Virtual training that was conducted in May 2022 by the Pacific Climate Change Centre to build adaptive capacity and enhance knowledge and skills of participants who work in the water sector on climate change and water.
Manager of the Pacific Climate Change Centre (PCCC), Ms. 'Ofa Ma’asi-Kaisamy, said that drought and sea-level rise are anticipated to severely impact water security in the Pacific, particularly in rural areas and outer islands.
“To ensure safe water access, our Pacific islands have many adaptation and mitigation projects in the water sector with support from climate finance mechanisms. To strengthen these climate actions, this training builds the capacity of practitioners in the region, and further enables project development to replicate and scale-up initiatives for ensuring safe water access”
Participants from the water and climate change sector built their understanding of observed and projected climate change impacts on the water sector as a result of the training. This will lead to further use of the information to formulate innovative technical solutions for management of rural safe water access in their countries.
Mr Marlchom Row, a participant from Solomon Islands reflected that “the training was very useful for me as a resilience officer working with the cross-cutting nature of climate change impacts. The knowledge gain and the skills acquired from this training gives me confidence to design climate change related- projects that would enhance the community resilience not only on water, but other sectors affected by Climate Change”
Ms. Shirley Anne Getsi of Papua New Guinea also found the training very useful – “We thank the PCCC through the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme for rolling out such a practical and relevant training focusing on a very specific sector which is water. We learnt many things, especially on how to design and formulate rural safe water related projects to build resilience to climate change for our communities in PNG”.
The participant from Fiji Mr. Rabinesh Chandra further elaborated that “the training, training materials and approach was practical in application and relevant for our work and we realised the importance of gender and social inclusion being included in the context of water as it involves safe water access for rural communities. The training has built our knowledge on accessing of new platform such as climocast which is very useful in data forecasting as justification for our future proposed climate project”
Participants also engaged in practical exercises on project development design for rural safe water access in the context of climate change for their respective countries.
The “Strengthening Climate resilience and safe water access in rural areas in the Pacific” training was held in person in Nadi, Fiji from 17 to 21 April.
The in-person training was made possible with funding support from New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) and partnership with experts from SPREP, the Fiji Ministry of Infrastructure and Meteorological Services, CSIRO – Australia, Moerk Water Solutions - Asia-Pacific and the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES)- Japan.
The Pacific Climate Change Center (PCCC) now have available free open learning courses here;https://spreptraining.moodlecloud.com/course/index.php?categoryid=8
For further information on the training courses delivered through this project, please contact [email protected]