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(Dr James Butler) We're here in Kimbe Bay in
West New Britain province of Papua New Guinea.
We're working on a project which is supporting
the Coral Triangle Initiative which is part of a
multi-national initiative between Papua New Guinea,
the Solomon Islands, Timor Leste, Indonesia,
Malaysia and the Philippines to try and protect a
globally important area of marine biodiversity
while also enhancing and enabling communities
to have improved livelihoods and food security.
This project is part of the Australian Government's
support for the Coral Triangle Initiative
and the project is aiming to develop a method
which can combine local stakeholder's knowledge
with scientific knowledge to plan for the future
of livelihoods while also trying to protect
and maintain the crucial marine biodiversity in
this part of the Coral Triangle.
Our project is aiming to develop participatory research
method which brings together multiple stakeholders,
both at the community level but also at the
Government and NGO level, to think about the future.
We provide information on potential climate change
but also other change such as population growth and
we are encouraging communities through this method to
think about the future and design adaptation strategies
which could cope for any eventuality.
Our workshops are showing that some of the things that
people can do to cope with climate change but also other
forms of change so we invite people who are from the
provincial government, from the national government,
from the local level governments but also from the villages themselves.
So we aim to bring those people together so they
can exchange ideas and learn collectively
about the future and their current issues and how
they need to solve their current issues to deal with
potential uncertainty and change in the future.
(Noelene Pidik) As a community development worker I've learned
so many things in this project and especially the
workshops that I've attended, in terms of how
to take the communities through in understanding the changes
that are taking place, whether they be with marine, terrestrial,
or development projects that are happening and how the communities
are involved in this process to adapt to the changes.
(Barbara Masike) Yes, I think the biggest thing that I have learned is
actually having a good insight into some of the issues that we are facing.
Yeah, together with CSIRO we were able to facilitate
this project in getting the West New Britain
provincial government and the local level governments
and various communities in West New Britain province have a good
understanding of the impact of climate change and how vulnerable
communities can be to rising sea levels and
rising sea temperatures but most of all to really
help them so that they can be able to prepare themselves so that they
can be able to cope with the impact of climate change.
(Dr James Butler) The project has had some
impacts already, particularly we've noticed in the
workshops that people have become much more aware
of the population issue. Population growth is
relatively fast in West New Britain and also in
other parts of Papua New Guinea and this is having
a huge effect on people's livelihoods in terms
of the amount of land that's available for growing
food and crops is declining rapidly, pollution
is increasing, social problems are increasing and there's a general
degradation of social conditions and particularly
traditional ways of doing things.
People, I think, have been aware of the impacts but not
necessarily aware of how severe population growth
is becoming and the effects that could have on
their ability to adapt to change.
Another impact that the project has had is enabling new
innovations to be introduced to people
who wouldn't otherwise know about them.
So for example, we're looking at new forms of growing garden crops
which are more able to cope with climatic variation,
particularly drought. Local researchers have been able to input
to the workshop processes to introduce this new
innovation and enable the communities to become
engaged in how they can apply it.
Another impact that the project has had is its enabled
people to think more about the role of marine resources
for their livelihoods and ways that they can conserve them.
In Kimbe Bay within West New Britain province
there's been a very successful program of establishing
locally managed marine areas. Now what our workshops
have managed to do is illustrate to other communities
outside Kimbe Bay how these locally managed marine
areas could be applied but also what some of the
future threats to LMA's would be, particularly the population issue.
So we've enabled communities to really think hard about how perhaps
LMA's should be reorganised and reprioritised to
cope with these future impacts of change.
(Yvonne Tio) The study undertaken by CSIRO, that's
contributed a lot to what we're trying to do
in terms of climate change adaptation, working in close
consultation with the Office of Climate Change
and our partners like the Nature Conservancy and
West New Britain provincial administration.
But there's also a likeness about the issues
that needs to be dealt with, not at the national
level but at the provincial local level and really going down
to the communities and trying to enhance the capacity
of the local people to get them prepared and also
to try and get them to start thinking about what
they should be doing rather than wait til very late.
(Dr James Butler) We acknowledge that to solve
the problems of the communities and to make them
more adaptable for the future it's not just science that matters,
local knowledge and local regional understanding of
issues is equally important. So what we're trying to
do through the project is combine our science and our
perspectives of the future with local understanding
of issues and problems and their perspectives of the
future, and altogether that makes a much stronger
approach for dealing with problems, particularly in
terms of building livelihoods that are sustainable.
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