The Hōkūle‘a canoe sails past the United Nations in New York. Credit: Lyndal Rowlands / IPS.

By Lyndal Rowlands
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 8 2016 (IPS)

Polynesian voyagers who have sailed the world by canoe using ancient navigation skills will bring pledges they collected along the way to the UN on Wednesday as part of World Oceans Day celebrations.

The voyagers sailed the Hōkūle‘a canoe to New York to deliver the pledges from countries and communities committed to doing their part to help save the world’s oceans to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

Nainoa Thompson, the Polynesian Voyaging Society’s Master Navigator told IPS that they were inspired to collect the declarations after Ban sailed with them in Apia, Samoa in the Summer of 2014.

“He gave us this bottle (capped) with his own handwritten note of his pledge to work with the membership of the UN (for) the betterment of the ocean,” said Thompson.

Thompson is master navigator of the Hōkūle‘a canoe. The voyagers uses the ancient traditions of Polynesian navigation to travel the oceans without technical instruments, knowledge which almost became extinct, but has been revived through decades of training.

Nainoa Thompson. Credit: The Polynesian Voyaging Society.

Hōkūle‘a has recently returned from a 37-month voyage covering about 50,000 miles in the Pacific Ocean.

“We are sailing on the belief that there are millions of people that are working for kindness and caring and compassion for the earth even though we’re not connected,” said Thompson. “We just want our voyaging canoe and our community to (be) part of that movement.”

The Hōkūle‘a canoe was launched 41 years ago, the first of its kind launched in over 600 years, says Thompson.

“It was our vehicle to allow us to explore and rediscover our ancient traditions primarily in voyaging and in navigation.”

“It was a reconnection not just to our culture, and to our tradition, and to our ancestors, but also reconnection back to the Pacific Islanders.”

Over that time, he says the voyagers have seen many changes in the oceans and peoples of the region.

“We’ve been witness to watching shifting change, not only in what’s been happening to the oceans physically, but what’s been happening to the relationship between islanders and the ocean in the biggest ocean, that’s the Pacific.”

During this time, Thompson says that he has observed increasing awareness around the Pacific of the science of the negative impacts on the oceans such as climate change and acidification.

“I think part of the solution to figure out how to protect the oceans is going to really require a meshing and a coming together of both science and technology with indigenous knowledge — those people who have lived and known these islands for generations and thousands of years.”

Thompson says that he has personally learnt a lot from his own teacher, who he described as the only known master navigator.

“We’re not master navigators, our generation is students of the great master, his name is Mau Piailug, he was the one who navigated to Tahiti for the first time in 1976.”

Thompson describes Piailug, who came from a tiny island called Satawal in Micronesia, as “a window into the ancient world and the ancient oceans.”

Satawal is “only a mile and quarter long and half mile wide,” yet the people who live there have a phenomonal “knowledge of the oceans, and of the stars, and the heavens, and the atmosphere, and the winds, and the clouds, and the sea life, and the sea birds,” said Thompson.

“We were lucky to have (Piailug), he changed the whole world view from another native group that was losing language and culture to a whole new world where we were the greatest navigators.”

“He came back and trained us for 30 years.”

“In that process we tried to understand really the importance of listening to your elders and spending time and trying to protect and preserve their knowledge of the ocean because it was getting so lost so quickly.”

“Extinction of cultural values and cultural lifestyles are happening everywhere so Mau singlehandedly shifted that whole mindset.”

“Back in 1975 there were no canoes, there were no voyages, there were no navigators. In Polynesia now there’s about 2500 active sailors,” said Thompson.

He added that learning the navigation skills helped his generation to better understand the oceans.

“The thing about the navigation is it forces it you to do two things: to observe and secondly to understand nature.”

Thompson says that his generation now has a responsibility to share this knowledge with the children of Hawaii and the world.

He says that there is also a need “to move education towards catching up with the real core issues that our children need to know.”

“The worldwide voyage is a relationship between those who are exploring, those who are learning, those who are bringing things back and getting it embedded into schools.”

The President of the University of Hawaii sailed with the Hōkūle‘a from Washington DC, to New York, and the Superintendent of the Hawaiian public schools system will also be joining the Hōkūle‘a at the UN on World Oceans Day.

Thompson said that ensuring that the knowledge was shared with Hawaii’s students was important because in the past that knowledge had been lost when it was banned from schools.

“The problem of why we know so little of native people is because it wasn’t taught in schools and Hawaiian culture, language and geneology was outlawed by policy by public and private schools back a hundred years ago.”

“The way to change that is really to change what you teach in schools.”

The voyagers plan to share the knowledge they collect of people who are doing great things to protect the oceans with the children of Hawaii.

Many of these examples also include school children, such as is the case with oyster farming in New York.

“New York was considered the largest oyster population in the world, the indigenous people lived directly off the sea food, that’s all they needed.”

However eventually the water became so polluted that the oyster larvae couldn’t survive, but more recently some New York schools have begun breeding the oysters themselves.

“The equation is that if you plant reefs of oysters, if you get a billion oysters you can filter the harbour in three days,” said Thompson.

New York restaurants have now got involved, and Thompson described the program as an example of how the economy and environment can work together for the better.

“That’s an equation that Hawaii needs to figure out, and that’s an equation that the world needs to figure out, but it’s happening in very special places.”

Over 10 million residents of Small Island Developing States depend on the Pacific Ocean for survival. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
SYDNEY, Jun 8 2013 (IPS)

The immense scale of the Pacific Ocean, at 165 million square kilometres, inspires awe and fascination, but for those who inhabit the 22 Pacific island countries and territories, it is the very source of life. Without it, livelihoods and economies would collapse, hunger and ill-health would become endemic and human survival would be threatened.

But as populations rapidly escalate, the sustainable future of this vast ecosystem hangs in the balance, while the pressing need for economic development in a region of Small Island Developing States competes with the urgency of combating climate change and stemming environmental loss.

In a message to the global community on Saturday, designated by the United Nations as World Ocean Day, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged nation states to “reverse the degradation of the marine environment due to pollution, overexploitation and acidification.” Nowhere is this triple threat more evident than in the waters of the Pacific.

The largest ocean in the world, it covers one third of the earth’s surface and an area more expansive than the total of all its landmasses, while its natural processes determine the global climate.

The ocean’s health is crucial to the food security of the region’s population of 10 million, whose annual fish consumption is three to four times the world average. For the rural majority, 60 to 90 percent of sea harvests are used for sustenance, while 47 percent of households depend on fishing as a main source of income.

At the regional level, the commercial fisheries sector – dominated by the tuna industry – contributes to approximately 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and 80 percent of all exports in one quarter of Pacific Island states.

However these coastal fisheries are now recognised as the most threatened by over-exploitation, pollution and climate change.

In Melanesian countries like the Solomon Islands – an archipelago nation of more than 900 forest-covered islands, lying just east of Papua New Guinea – population growth, which is 2.7 percent per year, is putting major pressure on resources. It is estimated that about 55 percent of Pacific Island nations have over-exploited coral reef fisheries.

Concerns about marine pollution have been exemplified by the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’, also known as the world’s largest landfill, a massive swirling gyre of 3.5 million tonnes of waste in the North Pacific Ocean.

Joeli Veitayaki, head of the School of Marine Studies at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, believes that “waste management is the biggest issue.”

“In some of the main population centres, there is no waste collection or treatment systems, while in others inappropriate methods are used. Communities and civil authorities are treating non-biodegradable and highly toxic waste as they have treated biodegradable waste,” he told IPS, adding, “Waste oil from some commercial operators is being disposed of in environmentally damaging ways that cause irreparable damage.”

The main sources of marine pollution are sewage, urban, agricultural and industrial run-off and plastic waste. In populated coastal island areas, plastic bags, containers and bottles are highly visible, suffocating marine habitats. Studies have revealed that fish in the North Pacific region are ingesting between 12,000 to 24,000 tonnes of plastic per year.

With UNICEF reporting that the average improved sanitation coverage in Oceanic countries is less than 50 percent, sewage remains a significant threat to the health of human and marine life.  Up to 25 percent of rural communities practise open defecation and piped untreated sewerage from many urban centres is discharged directly into the sea.

Future challenges to the ocean will come from climate change as increasing sea temperatures and ocean acidity are expected to drive alterations in fish populations and lead to the breakdown of coral reef systems that are important harbours of marine biodiversity.

Marine life has already been impacted by factors ranging from destructive fishing to pollution. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s Red List of Threatened Species, Papua New Guinea has incurred the highest losses in the region, with a total of 196 endangered marine species, including 157 species of coral, 20 species of sharks and four species of turtles. This year the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) launched a regional marine species conservation programme to improve protection of dugongs, marine turtles, whales and dolphins.

Pacific Islanders who have maintained a close cultural, social and economic relationship with the sea for thousands of years acknowledge the imperative of preserving the ocean for future generations.

In 2010, recognising that “no single country in the Pacific can by itself protect its own slice of oceanic environment”, the Pacific Islands Forum launched the regional Pacific Oceanscape initiative, a strategic framework to improve ocean governance.

“So far no (Pacific Island) country has formulated a national ocean policy to guide the action and activities in its maritime zones,” Veitayaki pointed out.

But action at the national level has included the acclaimed development of Marine Managed Areas (MMAs) that incorporate customary traditions of resource access and governance. There are approximately 1,232 active MMAs in the Pacific region covering 17,000 square kilometres, with 10 percent being designated as ‘no-take zones.’

Significant Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) include the Phoenix Islands Protected Area established by the government of Kiribati – a low-lying nation in the Central Pacific Ocean comprising a coral reef and 32 atolls – and the one-million-square-kilometre Cook Islands Marine Park, currently the world’s largest.

The century ahead will witness increasing human stresses on the Pacific Ocean as islanders with limited land areas and resources turn to the sea in search of ways to boost economic development.

Burgeoning deep sea mineral exploration projects, such as the Solwara 1 project in the vicinity of Papua New Guinea, has galvanised regional debate about the potential economic windfalls versus long term environmental impacts, the dearth of knowledge about deep sea marine biodiversity and the present lack of national governance and legislative frameworks to regulate commercial activity on the seafloor.

The future success of ocean management is dependent on reliable marine scientific data and building national capacities that enable policy implementation.

“Lack of up to date data is a major hindrance as we are always reacting to problems, such as depleting fisheries, damaged coral reefs and high pollution levels,” Veitayaki explained. “If assessments were better, management could be more preventive.”

Capacity for implementation, which he acknowledges has always been a major challenge for developing nations in the region, whether in terms of financial, technical or human resources, will demand more innovative and collaborative approaches by the diverse Pacific Island peoples whose survival depends on a healthy ocean.