Ana Okai Bakoa Issue 5 Eng.pdf - Phoenix Islands Protected Area

Ana Okai Bakoa
Phoenix Islands Protected Area
www.phoenixislands.org
PIPA starts its promotional
visits to churches, schools
and NGOs on Tarawa
Starting from this week, the
PIPA Education and Outreach
Officer reaches out to schools,
churches and NGOs. The activity,
which is central to the longterm
PIPA Awareness Programme
has begun with senior
schools first.
There are 7 high schools in Tarawa;
the KGV and EBS owned
by Government, the Moroni
High School owned by the
Church of Latter Day Saints,
William Goward Memorial College
owned by the Kiribati Protestant
Church, St Loiuse High
School, Sacred Heart High
School and St. Patrick High
School all owned by the Catholic
Church. Then there are 5 main
churches, the Roman Catholic,
the Kiribati Protestant Church,
the Seventh Day Adventist, the
Church of God and the Church
for Latter Day Saints. The Baha'i
faith community will also be
included in the visit. PIPA will
also visit the NGOs in Tarawa
like the KANGO, the FSPK and
the Ethocare.
As already stated in the last issues
of Ana Okai Bakoa, the
main reason to visit these entities
is to spread the programme of
PIPA and the relevance of its
programme to crosscutting issues
that these bodies engage in.
The churches always preach the
beauty and completeness of
creation and our PIPA message
will only enrich this understanding.
Schools children on the
other hand need to be groomed
in the understanding that our
survival rests in the balanced and
controlled exploitation of our
ecosystem.
PIPA In-Brief Issue 5
21 September 2012
PIPA
MELAD
PO Box 234
Bikenibeu Tarawa
Phone No: 29762
Photo: Cat Holloway
Kiribati has all rights to be proud: HE Anote Tong receives another
prestigious award, the Global Hillary Laureate Award
"His Excellency Te Beretitenti
is most delighted
and honoured to have been
considered as the recipient
of this award and would be
extremely pleased to accept
such honour on behalf
of his people and his nation
and others similarly
affected by climate
change".
Monday, 17 September,
2012 - 22:08: The Hillary
Institute of International
Leadership today announced
its 2012 global Hillary Laureate;
His Excellency, Te
Beretitenti, (President)
Anote Tong of Kiribati.
The Institute’s international
board, the Hillary Summit,
has selected President Tong
as its 4th annual Hillary
Laureate awardee and the
first for Leadership in
"Climate Equity", which is
the Institute’s Leadership
focus until 2015. Former
Hillary Laureates are Jeremy
Leggett (UK-2009), Peggy
Liu (China-2010) and
Aimee Christensen (USA-
2011). Ms. Liu also won the
Hillary Step prize earlier this
year.
Says Institute Chairman David
Caygill: "No nation symbolises
more dramatically than
Kiribati both the impact of
climate change and the inequity
of that impact on different
nations. President Tong has
HE Anote Tong during the Peter
Benchley Ocean Award ceremony in San
Francisco US, June 2012
been tireless in his efforts to draw
these concerns to the attention of
the world. We hope this award assists
his endeavours."
Hillary Summit Governor and
IPCC- Chair, Dr Rajendra Pachauri
adds; "I am truly delighted at the
selection of President Anote Tong.
I cannot think of a more deserving
person for this recognition and honour."
The Hillary Summit selected President
Tong from a global watch-list
the Institute has built on Leaders in
mid-career whose leadership on
Climate Equity issues is exceptional
and inspirational.
Says a spokesperson for President
Tong , "His Excellency Te Beretitenti
is most delighted and honoured
to have been considered as
the recipient of this award and
would be extremely pleased to accept
such honour on behalf of his
people and his nation and others
similarly affected by climate
change".
President Tong is the recipient of
many awards and recognition
for his leadership, the most recent
being the Peter Benchley
Ocean Award for Excellence in
National Stewardship of the
Ocean (Huffington Post, 12/8
2012). Given the stark sea-rise
realities confronting his nation
however, in what could be the
world's first climate-induced
migration of modern times, the
Kiribati President has recently
been in talks with relevant authorities
in Fiji to buy up to
6,000 acres of freehold land
initially as an investment option
and a food security safety net in
response to increasing challenges
posed by climate change.
Some of Kiribati's 32 pancakeflat
coral atolls, which straddle
the equator over 1,350,000
square miles of ocean are already
being seriously affected
requiring the relocation of some
village communities.
The Hillary Institute will work
with President Tong, to enhance
his work, both within his home
community and internationally.
He will also lead the Institute’s
5th Annual Symposium on Climate
Equity in Christchurch, in
November.
In June this year, Anote Tong
also received PhD in Ocean
Engineering from the University
of Pukyong National University,
South Korea. The University
president, Mr. Park Maeng-eon,
who presented this highest
award said with pride, “HE
Anote Tong is really an outstanding
ocean specialist and he
rightly deserves receiving this
highest award”.

Shark, king of the ocean
Shark helped save Toakai
Teitoi
'Shark helped save me' says rescued Kiribati
fisherman. MAJURO, Marshall Islands,
Sept 16, 2012 (AFP) -A day after
watching a film about being lost at sea, Toakai
Teitoi was trapped in his own nightmare,
drifting in a wooden boat for 15 weeks
before a shark helped to rescue him.
Toakai Teitoi at his home in Tarawa on his return
from the Marshall Islands. Photo by Te
Uekera
The 41-year-old Kiribati policeman and father-of-six
relived his harrowing voyage in
he central Pacific when he arrived in Majuro
on Saturday on the Marshall Islands fishing
boat which picked him up last week. He told
of sleeping with the body of his brother-inlaw
who died during the ordeal, suffering
severe dehydration and praying to be found
alive.
Teitoi's drama began on May 27 after he had
flown from his home island of Maiana to the
Kiribati capital of Tarawa to be sworn in as a
policeman. Following the ceremony, he
watched a film about four men from Kiribati
who were lost at sea. Only two survived by
the time they were washed ashore in American
Samoa six weeks later. It was then that
he changed his mind about flying home and
joined his brother-in-law Ielu Falaile, 52, on
what was supposed to be a two-hour sea
journey back to Maiana in a 15-foot wooden
boat. But after stopping to fish along the way
and sleeping overnight, they woke the following
day to find they had drifted out of
sight of Maiana and soon after ran out of
fuel. "We had food, but the problem was we
had nothing to drink," he said. As dehydration
took hold, Teitoi, a Catholic, said he
turned to prayer as it gave him strength. But
Falaile's health began failing and he died on
July 4. "I left him there overnight and slept
next to him like at a funeral," Teitoi said. He
buried his brother-in-law at sea the next
morning. Only a day after Falaile passed
away a storm blew into the area and rained
for several days allowing Teitoi to fill
two five-gallon containers with a life-saving
supply of fresh water. "There were two
choices in my mind at the time. Either some-
one would find me or I would follow my
brother-in-law. It was out of my control."
He continued to pray regularly and on
the morning of September 11 caught
sight of a fishing boat in the distance but
the crew were unable to see him.
Dejected, he did what he had done most
days, curling up under a small covered
area in the bow to stay out of the tropical
sun. Teitoi said he woke in the afternoon
to the sound of scratching and
looked overboard to see a six-foot shark
circling the boat and bumping the hull.
When the shark had his attention it
swam off.
"He was guiding me to a fishing boat. I
looked up and there was the stern of a
ship and I could see crew with binoculars
looking at me."
When the vessel Marshalls 203 pulled
Teitoi on board the first thing he asked
for was a cigarette. "They told me to
wait. They took me to meet the captain,
and they gave me juice and some food."
With Teitoi in no physical danger, the
Marshalls 203 continued fishing for
several days before returning to Majuro.
He was scheduled to fly from Majuro to
Tarawa on Sunday and will then fly to
Maiana. "I'll never go by boat again. I'm
taking a plane," he said.
Three shark species no
longer seen in Kiribati
waters
Nature News: 13 August 2012. For centuries,
the people of the Gilbert Islands in
the central Pacific Ocean have crafted
weapons from shark teeth. Joshua Drew,
a conservation biologist at Columbia
University in New York, has used these
teeth to show that the waters around the
islands - part of the Republic of Kiribati -
were once home to three species of shark
that no longer live in the area. “This is
shadow biodiversity,” said Drew, presenting
his results at the 2012 Ecological
Society of America Annual Meeting in
Portland, Oregon, last week. “Three
sharks disappeared from these reefs before
we even knew that they existed
there.” Drew analysed 124 shark-tooth weapons
housed in the collection of the Field Museum of
Natural History in Chicago, Illinois. The artifacts
included swords, tridents and a 4-metre-long
lance, dating back over 120 years. All the teeth in
one weapon usually come from one species, but
Drew found several blades in which the penultimate
tooth belonged to a rare species of blue
shark (Prionace lauca) - possibly the signature of
a single artisan. Sharks can be identified from
their teeth, so these weapons provide a clear
record of the species that once swam around the
Gilbert Islands. Drew used field guides and highresolution
photos to identify the teeth. “If there
was any ambiguity,” he says, “I just dropped
down to the ichthyological holdings, pulled out
the species I was looking at and literally got the
answer from the shark’s mouth.”
Lost species
Drew found that the teeth in the weapons came
from 19 species of shark, and that three of these
— the Spottail shark Carcharhinus sorrah),
dusky shark Carcharhinus obscurus) and bignose
shark (Carcharhinus altimus) — are no longer
found in waters close to the islands. The spottail
and dusky sharks were among the four species
most commonly used to make the weapons, but
records suggest that they are no longer found
within a few thousand kilometres of the Gilbert
Islands. It is unlikely that the teeth of these three
missing species were brought in by trade. Sharks
feature heavily in the Gilbert Islanders’ culture
and were already being fished locally when the
weapons were made. “There is no ethnographic,
linguistic or archaeological evidence for longdistance
trade with people who now live in the
areas where the sharks are found,” says Drew. It
is not clear why the species vanished but Drew
says it is “absolutely possible that humans had a
role in these declines”. Shark-finning — the practice
of hunting sharks for their fins alone, which
kills sharks in much greater bulk than ordinary
fishing — was first recorded in the area in 1910.
Weapons from
the Gilbert Islands
contain the
teeth of shark
s p e c i e s n o
longer found in
the
area. J. DREW/
C O L U M B I A
UNIV.