About the Project

The Pacific Islands Oceanic Fisheries Management project document was approved by the GEF Governing Council in May 2005 at the request of the Governments of the Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tokelau, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

The waters of the Pacific Islands region cover an area of around 40 million square kilometres, or over 10 per cent of the Earth’s surface and equivalent to about one third of the area of the Earth’s land surfaces. Most of this area falls within the national jurisdiction of the 15 Pacific small island developing States (SIDS) so that they are custodians of a significant part of the surface of the Earth and, in particular, custodians of a large part of one of the Earth’s major international waters ecosystems. These waters at the same time divide Pacific Island communities across huge distances and unite them by substantial dependence on a shared marine environment and shared marine resources. The waters hold the world’s largest stocks of tuna and related pelagic species. The waters of the Pacific Islands region provide around a third of the worlds’ catches of tuna and related species – and the broader Western and Central Pacific Ocean region, including Indonesia and Philippines, provides closer to half of the world’s tuna catches – around 2 million tonnes annually. The waters of the region also contain globally important stocks of sharks, billfish and other large pelagic species, whales and other marine mammals and turtles. The importance of the waters in geographical and environmental terms is enhanced by the significance of the management aspects of these waters.

Driven by the imperatives of their smallness in relation to the size of their marine jurisdictions and the economic importance of the marine resources to their welfare, the Pacific SIDS have developed a degree of cooperation and forms of working together which are globally important. In the late 1970’s Pacific SIDS established the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency Convention, committing themselves to cooperation in the management and development of fisheries in the areas within their newly extended jurisdictions. The regional initiatives were directed to science, compliance and development and have since come to form a unique body of collaboration in international fisheries management. Supported by this framework of cooperation, Pacific SIDS have shown considerable leadership in contributing to the development and application of global instruments for oceanic conservation and management. They led the process of opposition to large-scale driftnetting as it developed in the late 1980s, threatening a high level of destruction of seabirds, marine mammals and juvenile oceanic pelagic fish in areas of high seas beyond national control culminating in UN resolutions calling for a moratorium on large-scale driftnet fishing. They played a full role in the negotiation of the UN Fish Stocks Agreement, providing 7 of the 30 ratifications, which brought the Agreement into force in 2001. They led the development of the WCPF Convention which is the first major regional application of the provisions of the UN Fish Stocks Agreement, providing 10 of the 12 ratifications (with Australia and New Zealand) which brought the Convention into force on 19 June 2004.

This project is driven by the concern of Pacific SIDS about unsustainable use of the transboundary oceanic fish stocks of the Pacific Islands region and unsustainable levels and patterns of exploitation in the fisheries that target those stocks. The origins of the Project, its preparation, its objectives and its structure all address those concerns. These are transboundary concerns that apply especially to the impacts of unregulated fishing in the areas of high seas in the region, but also apply more generally across all waters of the region. At the centre of these concerns is the transboundary nature of the stocks. The stocks are dominantly highly migratory, with their range extending through waters under the jurisdiction of around 20 countries and into large areas of high seas. Each of the countries within whose waters the stocks occur has responsibilities under international law to adopt measures for the conservation and management of these stocks. But without a coherent and legally binding framework to establish and apply measures throughout the range of the stocks, including the high seas, the efforts made by individual countries in their own waters can be undermined by unregulated fishing on the high seas and by inconsistencies in measures in different national zones.