November 2007

The GEF-Pacific Alliance for Sustainability:
An Evolving Partnership

The islands of the Pacific Ocean are some of the most beautiful islands in the worlds – many call them a string of brilliant black pearls along the blue Pacific.

These islands stand as symbols to the rest of the world in two ways. First, they hold some of the planet’s greatest natural wealth and cultural treasures. Second, they are at the end of the spectrum of environmental risks. Their citizens face a potentially deadly combination of economic challenges and environmental vulnerability, more serious than the risks facing many other regions today.

The GEF is helping the islands of the Pacific find the means by which they can participate fully in the protection of the global commons while they move to achieve sustainable social and economic development. It is a difficult time to undertake this task for the islands’ governments. As the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has demonstrated, the window for responding to the stresses on the environment is rapidly growing smaller and the costs are growing larger.

The GEF has provided approximately $86 million to 14 of this region’s countries during the past 15 years for programs addressing biodiversity, climate change, and persistent organic pollutants. In order to accelerate its work and intensify efforts, the GEF is offering a new GEF-Pacific Alliance for sustainability through a proposed Multi-Focal GEF Program for Pacific SIDS (Small Island Developing States), structured on an innovative new three-pronged approach. The total GEF funding available for this program for three years is proposed to be approximately $100 million, a nearly six-fold increase on an annual basis.
The program includes:

• An exponential increase in funding throughout the region, making use of country allocations under the newly instituted Resource Allocation Framework
• A new programmatic approach, rather than attacking problems project by project
• A newly rationalized regional approach, which will help aggregate national programs at the regional level to scale up the impact throughout the Pacific

The World Bank will take the lead as implementing agency for the initiative, working together with the GEF Secretariat, and will bring its robust expertise to bear on the undertaking.

In response to top national priorities, the GEF will work through four areas of concern:
biodiversity; climate change mitigation and adaptation; international waters; and cross-cutting issues integrated across sectors, such as land and water management.

In biodiversity, these island countries face increasing pressures from a variety of sources that increasingly cause breakdowns in ecological systems and loss of biodiversity. The GEF is proposing that the biodiversity program would focus on: management of coastal and marine protected areas; prevention, control, and management of invasive alien species; and conservation and sustainable use of forest resources. The program could include a regional approach to managing invasive alien species, in support of the South Pacific Regional Invasive Species Strategy. It would focus on marine biodiversity conservation through protected areas.

In climate change, these countries are faced with tremendous pressures that will ultimately have a grave impact on the sustainable development they are working so hard to achieve. The GEF is suggesting a two-pronged approach, which includes some mitigation and provides a strong focus on adaptation. Support for mitigation could be through renewable energy projects in countries and in larger countries through projects focusing on energy efficient buildings. Regionally, these two initiatives would help reduce the cost of imported fossil fuels.

However, perhaps more critical is the GEF’s support for climate change adaptation. Adaptation funding from the GEF, including the climate change adaptation funds, will support the Pacific SIDS’ work to identify and implement suitable adaptation measures. Those will include the integration of adaptation into core development sectors such as: agriculture and food security; access to drinking and irrigation water; health care; and disaster risk management. Moreover, the GEF can work with the countries to establish a process to climate-proof the critical infrastructure so that climate-related risks become an integral part of national strategic planning.

Based on earlier GEF work, the countries identified two priorities for urgent action for international waters: management of the tuna fishery in the Pacific Warm Pool and protection and management of freshwater supplies. This had led to adoption and ratification of the landmark Convention on the Conservation and Management of Highly Migratory Fish Stocks in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean. The GEF wants to build on those initiatives. The GEF would also like to help establish an integrated water management system, including surface and groundwater, in all the Pacific SIDS, with consideration of water harvesting and waste water management, and differentiated approaches in highly water-stressed, low-lying islands (atolls) and in volcanic mountainous islands.

Finally, in addressing cross-cutting issues, the GEF would help countries focus on areas such as tourism and solid waste management. Efforts to identify solid waste management activities similar to what Australia has supported in toxic waste management can be considered as a joint intervention in the international waters and land management focal areas. This program would respond to the priorities identified in the Mauritius Declaration and other conventions while fitting well with the emerging strategic priorities of the GEF.