The Environmental Planning Unit of the Environmental Monitoring and Governance (EMG) programme of the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) has recently delivered an in-country training workshop to the National Environment Service (NES) of the Cook Islands. The week-long programme was hosted at the NES office in Rarotonga and attended by over 20 officers from the Service. The training was focused on raising the capacity of NES on Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA).
SPREP has had a close working relationship with the NES and has delivered several capacity building programmes for the agency, including an EIA training conducted by the SPREP planning team in 2017. This training was a follow-up to the previous training and was led by the Director of the EMG programme, Jope Davetanivalu, the Pacific Network for Environmental Assessment (PNEA) Technical Officer, Ivan Diarra, and the EMG Programme Assistant, Faasipa Tinai.
The objectives of the training workshop were to provide capacity building on reporting requirements under relevant MEA’s and strengthen participants’ understanding and application of the EIA and SEA process in the Cook Islands through practical exercises and discussion. The workshop also provided an avenue to discuss NES compliance, monitoring and enforcement system and strengthening EIA compliance and enforcement in the Cook Islands.