About PIMPAC

Pacific Islands Marine Protected Areas Community

What is PIMPAC?

The Pacific Islands Marine Protected Area Community (PIMPAC) is a pilot effort that depends on the collaboration and support of numerous agencies, organizations, and individuals. PIMPAC recognizes that MPA practitioners have many responsibilities and we seek to design the program to minimize demands on their time and maximize benefits to their MPA efforts. It is the aim of PIMPAC to build partnerships of Pacific Islands MPA managers and agencies to bring support to the region toward strengthening MPA efforts and conserving the marine resources of the Pacific Islands.

Vision
PIMPAC is envisioned to be a collaboration of MPA managers, non-governmental organizations, federal, state, and territorial agencies, local communities, and other stakeholders working together to collectively enhance the effective use and management of MPAs in the U.S. Pacific Islands and Freely Associated States.

Benefits
Based on workshop outcomes, PIMPAC sets its sights on beginning to collaboratively address identified priorities in September/October of 2005. While these priority focus areas and specific actions will be developed by the workshop participants, some broad efforts and benefits based on the general understanding of MPA challenges and experiences in the region could include:

Supporting the expressed needs of MPA sites and programs through focused skill building trainings, facilitating access to experts, and promoting staff exchanges.

Building partnerships with academic and other institutions in the region to strengthen long-term, locally-based MPA management in the Pacific Islands..

Fostering information sharing about, and development of, local and traditional management techniques that complement current MPA systems.

Promoting the exchange of knowledge, skills, lessons, and experiences by creating a regional learning network focused on peer to peer learning. This approach will build partnerships and learn from the experience of other successful efforts in other parts of the Pacific.

History of PIMPAC
PIMPAC grew out of extensive outreach with MPA managers and affiliated agencies and staff within the region that explored the greatest challenges faced by MPA managers as well as ideas to address these challenges.

The Pacific Islands have a long history of traditional management approaches for marine resources—many of which may provide solutions to today’s management challenges. However, the MPAs in the Pacific Islands have their own unique set of challenges which have inhibited them from being as effective as possible.

Despite the wealth of knowledge the Pacific Islands’ traditional approaches can offer, MPA managers in the Pacific must balance building on these traditional approaches while adapting to modern technology and practices. To play a successful role in MPA management, traditional and local approaches must be actively fostered, developed, and integrated into current MPA systems.

In addition, MPA managers in the Pacific are often very isolated from one another due to the great distances between islands. The geographical distance makes it very difficult for them to share knowledge and lessons learned with each other. Also, because the Pacific Islands are small, they have limited human and financial resources to work with.

Based on the interest expressed in the outreach results, for establishing a regionally coordinated network, a workshop of over 45 marine protected area (MPA) leaders from around the Pacific Islands was held in August 2005. The workshop, held in Tumon, Guam and co-hosted by NOAA and the University of Guam, brought together governmental and non-governmental representatives from the U.S. Pacific Islands, Freely Associated States of the Pacific, and Fiji to discuss the strengths and challenges of MPAs in the Pacific Islands.

To utilize existing regional strengths and address the challenges, the meeting participants shared a common vision for a regional coordination network that would strengthen their individual and collective MPA efforts. The group committed to work together in an evolving regional Pacific Islands MPA Community (PIMPAC) to overcome these barriers. Based on the workshop outcomes, a work plan was developed to direct the first year activities/priority actions and develop a list of priority actions to guide PIMPAC over the next year.