EU PACRES USP Samoa Mission a Success: Placing Community Resilience at the heart of project intervention

The University of the South Pacific (USP) European Union (EU)-funded Intra-ACP GCCA+ Pacific Adaptation to Climate Change and Resilience Building (PACRES) programme team is currently in Samoa, conducting consultations, interviews, and site visits with key PACRES beneficiaries.

The trip allowed the project team to gather lessons learned from implementation of the PACRES USP component in Samoa, particularly across the eight communities in Savai’i. The lessons learned are crucial to further strengthen future capacity building work in the country as well as identify ways to improve future engagements. The team was well received by the Government of Samoa’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MNRE) and local communities in Savai’i, who have been instrumental in the implementation of the PACRES Project.

Mr. Moafanua Tolusina Pouli, Assistant Chief Executive Officer (AC.O) of the Forestry Division at the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MNRE) in Samoa, acknowledged the impact of the USP PACRES program in communities in Samoa, saying, “we need to work with the communities as they are the beneficiaries of any implementation.”

“In terms of capacity building, the overall component of the USP PACRES project benefited our communities, working very closely with USP and those who have been trained through the project component,”

As part of the program’s overall goal of increasing resilience across the five implementing countries through capacity building in resilient development, the following activities have been implemented across eight communities on Samoa’s Savaii Island:

• Participatory Needs Analysis
• Intensive Root Crop-based Cropping Systems for Food Security, Sustainability and Climate Resilience Training
• Impacts Survey Training
• Community Integrated Management (CIM) Plan 2018 Awareness
• UNDP SGP Grant and Proposal Writing Training
• Human Rights, Gender, and Social Inclusion Training
• 2 Million Tree Planting Campaign 2022 – 2028 Awareness and Tree Planting The partnerships established and impacts of project interventions are clearly visible and the project team is hopeful that communities will continue to realized in the near future.

The activities and implementation of the USP PACRES programme would not have been possible without the collaboration and support of MNRE, United Nations Development Programme, local communities and the USP Alafua Campus in achieving the programme’s goals of developing an integrated approach to addressing Climate Change and Disaster Risk Management in the Pacific-ACP region.

The USP component of the EU-funded Intra-ACP GCCA+ PACRES programme is implemented in partnership with the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), the Pacific Community (SPC), and the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (PIFS).