PIMPAC Mission

The Pacific Islands Managed and Protected Area Community (PIMPAC) aims to provide continuous opportunities for the sharing  of information, expertise, practice, and experience to develop and strengthen area-based management capacity throughout the Pacific Islands region.

PIMPAC Scope

PIMPAC provides support to area based management efforts in the region.  This includes both land and marine managed and protected areas and aims to support a holistic approach to management from ridge to reef.  

PIMPAC Audience

PIMPAC provides support to “on the ground” resource managers, while maintaining good coordination/communication with other networks/agencies that focus support to political/organizational leaders (e.g. MC/USCRTF/MIC) or community members (LMMA).

PIMPAC Approach

As a social network, PIMPAC uses four main approaches to carry out it’s mission.  They are: 1) Training and Technical Support, 2) Learning Exchanges, 3) Partnership Building, and 4) Communications/ Information Sharing

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.