Strengthening partnerships for the environment to help Pacific island countries better manage their natural resources is the goal of a close collaboration between two SPREP projects - the regional Inform data management project and BIOPAMA. The goal of the partnership is to help Pacific island countries better report on, and understand the status of protected areas, conservation and the environment in their respective jurisdictions.
The partnership is helping reduce redundancy and increase benefits to Pacific island countries from the two complementary SPREP environment projects.
The Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) and the Pacific Community (SPC) are demonstrating leadership and the true spirit of collaboration by entering into a partnership that will benefit Pacific island countries through two online data tools, the Pacific Environment Portal (PEP) and the Pacific Data Hub (PDH).
The agreement was officially signed by SPREP Director General, Mr Kosi Latu, and SPC Director General, Dr Colin Tukuitonga, in Noumea recently.
The Environment and Conservation Division (ECD) of the Ministry of Environment, Climate Change, Disaster Management and Meteorology is developing the 2019 State of Environment (SoE) Report. Once endorsed, this report will be available on the Solomon Islands Environment Data Portal (https://solomonislands-data.sprep.org/
The regional Inform project is holding a meeting this week to review progress towards building national and regional capacity to improve environmental decision-making through strengthening planning and reporting in the Pacific.
The Inform project is mid-way through implementation and is taking stock of results achieved and hearing back from the countries of the progress in the new tools and processes being developed by the project to address the on-going challenge of compiling high quality data on the environment and making best use of it.
PNG has a total of about 46.9 million hectare of which 77.8% is forested with 13 natural forest types and forest plantations with various species planted. The second major land use in PNG is cropland, which covers 11.0% of the total land area. Grassland covers 5.3% and wetland comprised 4.8% of the total land mass. Other Land including bare soil and rock covers 0.2% of the total land area. Settlements including villages and cities cover 0.9% of the land area.
Source: Papua New Guinea’s National REDD+ Forest Reference Level 2017
Inform: Helping to strengthen governance and decision making through addressing gaps in environmental data across the Pacific region.
Short, quick pops of information to help enhance your speeches, media interviews and soundbites, presentations and general message sharing when it comes work done by Pacific islands with support from the Inform Project on environmental data use in the Pacific.
You can now download OpenStreetMap (OSM) data from the Pacific Environment Portal!
OpenStreetMap is a free map of the world, that you can use and contribute to. The data that you have access to now, comes as a bundle of individual GIS layers, pre-styled in a QGIS project, which you can use as a base map or combine with other spatial datasets.