R2C3 : Ouvea and Nouméa, 23-27 April.

We have intentionally organised the workshop R2C3 few days before the 3rd Oceania21 regional meeting (Noumea 28-30 Avril: Pacific government delegations invited by New Caledonia to elaborate a common declaration on consequences of climate change in the Pacific, to be brought to the world-wide COP21 meeting in Paris, in December 2015). The R2C3 workshop is an outcome of our program (EHESS@ANU, sponsored by the French Fonds Pacifique), together with the NGO Agora-SHS-New Caledonia (www.agora.nc) and the final phase of a program linking Marshall Islands and Ouvea (IRD, College of Marshall Isl., Fonds Pacifique), with support from Ouvea authorities. The acronym R2C3 refers to "Climate Change and its Consequences" C3, within a comparison of the agency in "Regional Resilience" put forward by several countries of the South Pacific. It is also part of a project of a regional Oceania Observatory of C3 (O2C3), an initiative from IRD-Noumea, UMR GRED, Victor David and USP, Prof, Vijay Naidu).

The workshop was held during three days in Ouvea, in several communities of this atoll island, with a "restitution" day in Noumea (IRD Centre). Why Ouvea? Local authorities in charge today —and in the recent past, such as Honorary Senator Simon Loueckhote—, had alerted us on the acceleration of the costal erosion in Ouvea (that topic was also raised by the Senator few years ago, within a Parliamentary Delegation from New Caledonia which visited the Australian Parliament, the French Embassy in Canberra and the ANU; see picture in our News, 21 March 2012: www.pacific-dialogues.fr/pacific_news_09_eng.php). Ouvea is an atoll, in some parts as low-lying above sea level as other endangered atolls of the Pacific. This has already been the starting point of the comparative project OREMPSIP (Marshall Isl and Ouvea). For the R2C3 workshop, we could organise the participation of representatives of Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Tuamotu (French Polynesia) communities who are facing those threats. The interaction with local communities has been intensive, also with students from 3 high schools of Ouvea. Multilingual understanding was facilitated through the simultaneous translation offered by Mrs Karine Bachelier-Bourat, delegated by the Regional Cooperation of the Government of New Caledonia (Victor David and Serge Tcherkezoff also contributed).