SPC Geoscience Division

INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT NEEDS FOR EXPLORATION AND EXPLOITATION OF DEEP SEABED MINERALS - Nadi, Fiji, 29th November 2nd December 2011

Welcome Remarks - Dr. Russell Howorth, Director – SOPAC Division, Secretariat of the Pacific Community

Honourable Minister Timoci Natuva, Minister of Works and Public Utilities here in Fiji
His Excellency Dr Nii Oduntun, Secretary General of the International Seabed Authority
Distinguished Guests representing Pacific Island countries, and countries from around the world, academia, regional and international intergovernmental and nongovernmanetal organisations, and the private sector.
Colleagues and staff from the Fiji Government, ISA and SOPAC

From the Managers Desk

We have just completed the first annual meeting of the SOPAC Division of the SPC. Now no longer a separate regional intergovernmental organisation the former membership of the SOPAC Council as it was known up to 2010 was 'reconstituted' as the SOPAC Division Meeting.

The meeting included the reporting of work programme delivery by each of the threee SOPAC technical programme areas.

Importantly, the meeting endorsed a process for the development of an integrated regional strategy for Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change Adaptation & Mitigation by 2015.

Such a strategy would succeed the existing Pacific Disaster Risk Reduction and Disaster Management Framework for Action 2005 - 2015 and the Pacific Islands Framework for Action on Climate Change 2006 - 2015.

Wednesday November 9, 2011, Suva, Fiji - A Pacific wide exercise to test and improve the emergency response to tsunamis took place today with 20 Pacific Islands Countries, including Australia and New Zealand, running simulations and drills.

Known as Pacific Wave 11, the exercise asked countries to pick one of 10 regional or local tsunami scenarios to react to. The hypothetical tsunamis were created by powerful earthquakes off the shores of either Russia, Ryukyu Islands, west and east of the Philippines, Vanuatu, Tonga, Chile, Ecuador, Central America, and Aleutian Islands. Fiji, for example, is basing their scenario on a magnitude 8.9 earthquake in the Tonga trench, while Palau is basing theirs on a massive earthquake in the Philippine Trench.

Having spent much of his working life in Papua New Guinea, petroleum geologist Michael McWalter has seen the development of the petroleum industry within PNG, and has come to call that country his home.

“I haven’t lived in England for oodles of time, so yes, PNG is very much home,” said Mr McWalter, Advisor to the PNG Department of Petroleum and Energy while attending the Annual Directors’ meeting of the Circum-Pacific Council, held this year in conjunction with the mid-October SPC/SOPAC Division’s STAR meeting in Nadi.