The first staff exchange between PaCE-SD (USP) and the University of Canterbury’s Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies (UC-MBC) recently took place from April 4 – 18.
Jasha Dehm, Research Fellow and Jiaoji Sigavata, I.T officer are both part of the Pacific Ocean and Climate Crisis Assessment Project (POCCA) at PaCE-SD which has an exchange scheme with UC-MBC as part of its project agreement.
Whilst visiting UC, they were fortunate to work under the leadership of Distinguished Professor Steven Ratuva, the Director of the Macmillan Brown Centre and Prof. Elisabeth Holland to develop POCCA’s digital database.
The staff exchange was successful in achieving its objectives of promoting knowledge and expertise sharing among participating organizations and building relationships and collaboration between individuals and institutions in different countries.
The exchange’s key outcomes were the development of an interactive map and a digital database.
The interactive map will capture patterns and trends in resilience and the impacts of the climate crisis in the Pacific, enabling national and regional planners to visualize spatially how communities are coping with climate change.
The digital database will offer access to relevant, useful, and timely data for decision-making, ranging from literature to policies and digital media.
The success of the 2-week endeavor is highlighted by POCCA’s plan to launch the digital database, including the interactive map, at the 2nd POCCA Authors Conference in June of this year.
The exchange program between institutions and individuals will help to build capacity and promote sustainable development in participating countries, thereby supporting the POCCA project’s goal of assessing local adaptation and resilience capacity and innovation at the community level and incorporating this information into national and regional climate change policies, projects, and strategies.
POCCA’s main goal is to assess local adaptation and resilience capacity, as well as community-level innovation, and to incorporate this information into national and regional climate change policies, projects, and strategies.
The Pacific Ocean and Climate Crisis Assessment Project (POCCA) is a three-year project funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT), New Zealand and is a collaboration between the University of the South Pacific’s (USP) Pacific Centre of Environment and Sustainable Development (PaCE-SD) and the University of Canterbury’s (UC) Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies (MBC).
