Greg Stone: Saving the ocean one island at a time

64,319 views ・ 2010-11-03

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:16
I guess the story actually has to start
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maybe back in the the 1960s,
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when I was seven or eight years old,
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watching Jacques Cousteau documentaries on the living room floor
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with my mask and flippers on.
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Then after every episode, I had to go up to the bathtub
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and swim around the bathtub and look at the drain,
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because that's all there was to look at.
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And by the time I turned 16,
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I pursued a career in marine science,
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in exploration and diving,
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and lived in underwater habitats, like this one off the Florida Keys,
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for 30 days total.
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Brian Skerry took this shot. Thanks, Brian.
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And I've dived in deep-sea submersibles around the world.
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And this one is the deepest diving submarine in the world,
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operated by the Japanese government.
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And Sylvia Earle and I
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were on an expedition in this submarine
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20 years ago in Japan.
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And on my dive, I went down 18,000 feet,
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to an area that I thought
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would be pristine wilderness area on the sea floor.
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But when I got there, I found
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lots of plastic garbage and other debris.
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And it was really a turning point in my life,
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where I started to realize
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that I couldn't just go have fun doing science and exploration.
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I needed to put it into a context.
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I needed to head towards conservation goals.
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So I began to work
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with National Geographic Society and others
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and led expeditions to Antarctica.
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I led three diving expeditions to Antarctica.
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Ten years ago was a seminal trip,
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where we explored that big iceberg, B-15,
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the largest iceberg in history, that broke off the Ross Ice Shelf.
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And we developed techniques
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to dive inside and under the iceberg,
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such as heating pads on our kidneys
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with a battery that we dragged around,
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so that, as the blood flowed through our kidneys,
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it would get a little boost of warmth
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before going back into our bodies.
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But after three trips to Antarctica,
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I decided that it might be nicer to work in warmer water.
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And that same year, 10 years ago,
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I headed north to the Phoenix Islands.
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And I'm going to tell you that story here in a moment.
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But before I do, I just want you to ponder this graph for a moment.
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You may have seen this in other forms,
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but the top line is the amount of protected area
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on land, globally,
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and it's about 12 percent.
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And you can see that it kind of hockey sticks up
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around the 1960s and '70s,
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and it's on kind of a nice trajectory right now.
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And that's probably because
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that's when everybody got aware of the environment
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and Earth Day
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and all the stuff that happened in the '60s with the Hippies and everything
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really did, I think, have an affect on global awareness.
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But the ocean-protected area
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is basically flat line
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until right about now -- it appears to be ticking up.
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And I do believe that we are at the hockey stick point
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of the protected area in the ocean.
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I think we would have gotten there a lot earlier
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if we could see what happens in the ocean
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like we can see what happens on land.
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But unfortunately, the ocean is opaque,
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and we can't see what's going on.
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And therefore we're way behind on protection.
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But scuba diving, submersibles
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and all the work that we're setting about to do here
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will help rectify that.
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So where are the Phoenix Islands?
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They were the world's largest marine-protected area
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up until last week
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when the Chagos Archipelago was declared.
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It's in the mid-Pacific. It's about five days from anywhere.
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If you want to get to the Phoenix Islands,
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it's five days from Fiji,
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it's five days from Hawaii, it's five days from Samoa.
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It's out in the middle of the Pacific,
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right around the Equator.
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I had never heard of the islands 10 years ago,
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nor the country, Kiribati, that owns them,
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till two friends of mine who run a liveaboard dive boat in Fiji
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said, "Greg, would you lead a scientific expedition up to these islands?
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They've never been dived."
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And I said, "Yeah.
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But tell me where they are and the country that owns them."
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So that's when I first learned of the Islands
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and had no idea what I was getting into.
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But I was in for the adventure.
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Let me give you a little peek here of the Phoenix Islands-protected area.
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It's a very deep-water part of our planet.
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The average depths are about 12,000 ft.
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There's lots of seamounts in the Phoenix Islands,
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which are specifically part of the protected area.
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Seamounts are important for biodiversity.
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There's actually more mountains in the ocean than there are on land.
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It's an interesting fact.
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And the Phoenix Islands is very rich in those seamounts.
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So it's a deep -- think about it in a big three-dimensional space,
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very deep three-dimensional space
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with herds of tuna, whales,
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all kinds of deep sea marine life
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like we've seen here before.
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That's the vessel that we took up there
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for these studies, early on,
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and that's what the Islands look like -- you can see in the background.
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They're very low to the water,
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and they're all uninhabited, except one island
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has about 35 caretakers on it.
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And they've been uninhabited for most of time
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because even in the ancient days,
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these islands were too far away
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from the bright lights of Fiji and Hawaii and Tahiti
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for those ancient Polynesian mariners
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that were traversing the Pacific so widely.
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But we got up there,
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and I had the unique and wonderful scientific opportunity and personal opportunity
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to get to a place that had never been dived
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and just get to an island and go, "Okay, where are we going to dive?
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Let's try there,"
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and then falling into the water.
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Both my personal and my professional life changed.
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Suddenly, I saw a world
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that I had never seen before in the ocean --
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schools of fish that were so dense
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they dulled the penetration of sunlight from the surface,
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coral reefs that were continuous
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and solid and colorful,
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large fish everywhere,
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manta rays.
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It was an ecosystem. Parrotfish spawning --
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this is about 5,000 longnose parrotfish spawning
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at the entrance to one of the Phoenix Islands.
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You can see the fish are balled up
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and then there's a little cloudy area there
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where they're exchanging the eggs and sperm for reproduction --
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events that the ocean is supposed to do,
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but struggles to do in many places now
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because of human activity.
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The Phoenix Islands and all the equatorial parts of our planet
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are very important for tuna fisheries,
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especially this yellowfin tuna that you see here.
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Phoenix Islands is a major tuna location.
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And sharks -- we had sharks on our early dives,
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up to 150 sharks at once,
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which is an indication
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of a very, very healthy, very strong, system.
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So I thought the scenes
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of never-ending wilderness
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would go on forever,
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but they did finally come to an end.
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And we explored the surface of the Islands as well --
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very important bird nesting site,
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some of the most important bird-nesting sites in the Pacific, in the world.
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And we finished our trip.
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And that's the area again.
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You can see the Islands -- there are eight islands --
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that pop out of the water.
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The peaks that don't come out of the water are the seamounts.
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Remember, a seamount turns into an island when it hits the surface.
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And what's the context of the Phoenix Islands?
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Where do these exist?
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Well they exist in the Republic of Kiribati,
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and Kiribati is located in the Central Pacific
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in three island groups.
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In the west we have the Gilbert Islands.
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In the center we have the Phoenix Islands,
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which is the subject that I'm talking about.
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And then over to the east we have the Line Islands.
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It's the largest atoll nation in the world.
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And they have
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about 110,000 people
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spread out over 33 islands.
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They control 3.4 million cubic miles of ocean,
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and that's between one and two percent
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of all the ocean water on the planet.
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And when I was first going up there,
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I barely knew the name of this country 10 years ago,
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and people would ask me,
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"Why are you going to this place called Kiribati?"
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And it reminded me of that old joke
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where the bank robber comes out of the courthouse handcuffed,
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and the reporter yells, "Hey, Willy. Why do you rob banks?"
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And he says, "cause that's where all the money is."
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And I would tell people, "Why do I go to Kiribati?
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Because that's where all the ocean is."
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They basically are one nation
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that controls most of the equatorial waters
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of the Central Pacific Ocean.
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They're also a country
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that is in dire danger.
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Sea levels are rising,
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and Kiribati, along with 42 other nations in the world,
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will be under water within 50 to 100 years
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due to climate change
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and the associated sea-level rise from thermal expansion
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and the melting of freshwater into the ocean.
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The Islands rise only one to two meters
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above the surface.
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Some of the islands have already gone under water.
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And these nations are faced with a real problem.
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We as a world are faced with a problem.
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What do we do with displaced fellow Earthlings
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who no longer have a home on the planet?
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The president of the Maldives
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conducted a mock cabinet meeting
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underwater recently
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to highlight the dire straits of these countries.
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So it's something we need to focus on.
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But back to the Phoenix Islands,
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which is the subject of this Talk.
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After I got back, I said,
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okay, this is amazing, what we found.
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I'd like to go back and share it with the government of Kiribati,
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who are over in Tarawa,
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the westernmost group.
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So I started contacting them --
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because they had actually given me a permit to do this --
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and I said, "I want to come up and tell you what we found."
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And for some reason they didn't want me to come,
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or it was hard to find a time and a place, and it took a while,
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but finally they said, "Okay, you can come.
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But if you come, you have to buy lunch
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for everybody who comes to the seminar."
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So I said, "Okay, I'm happy to buy lunch.
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Just get whatever anybody wants."
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So David Obura, a coral reef biologist, and I went to Tarawa,
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and we presented for two hours
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on the amazing findings of the Phoenix Islands.
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And the country never knew this. They never had any data from this area.
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They'd never had any information from the Phoenix Islands.
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After the talk, the Minister of Fisheries walked up to me
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and he said, "Greg, do you realize
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that you are the first scientist
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who has ever come back
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and told us what they did?"
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He said, "We often issue these permits
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to do research in our waters,
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but usually we get a note two or three years later,
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or a reprint.
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But you're the first one who's ever come back and told us what you did.
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And we really appreciate that. And we're buying you lunch today.
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And are you free for dinner?"
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And I was free for dinner,
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and I went out to dinner with the Minister of Fisheries in Kiribati.
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And over the course of dinner,
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I learned that Kiribati gains most of its revenue --
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it's a very poor country --
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but it gains what revenue is has
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by selling access to foreign nations
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to take fish out of its waters,
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because Kiribati does not have the capacity
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to take the fish itself.
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And the deal that they strike
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is the extracting country
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gives Kiribati five percent
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of the landed value.
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So if the United States
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removes a million dollars'
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worth of lobsters from a reef,
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Kiribati gets 50,000 dollars.
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And, you know, it didn't seem like a very good deal to me.
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So I asked the Minister over dinner,
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I said, "Would you consider a situation
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where you would still get paid --
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we do the math and figure out what the value of the resource is --
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but you leave fish and the sharks
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and the shrimp in the water?"
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He stopped, and he said, "Yes, we would like to do that
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to deal with our overfishing problem,
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and I think we would call it a reverse fishing license."
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He coined the term "reverse fishing license."
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So I said, "Yes, a 'reverse fishing license.'"
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So we walked away from this dinner
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really not knowing where to go at that point.
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I went back to the States and started looking around
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to see if I could find examples
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where reverse fishing licenses
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had been issued,
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and it turned out there were none.
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There were no oceanic deals
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where countries were compensated for not fishing.
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It had occurred on land,
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in rainforests of South America and Africa,
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where landowners had been paid
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not to cut the trees down.
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And Conservation International had struck some of those deals.
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So I went to Conservation International
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and brought them in as a partner
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and went through the process
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of valuing the fishery resource,
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deciding how much Kiribati should be compensated,
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what the range of the fishes were,
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brought in a whole bunch of other partners --
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the government of Australia,
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the government of New Zealand, the World Bank.
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The Oak Foundation and National Geographic
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have been big funders of this as well.
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And we basically founded the park
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on the idea of an endowment
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that would pay the equivalent lost fishing license fees
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to this very poor country
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to keep the area intact.
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Halfway through this process, I met the president of Kiribati,
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President Anote Tong.
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He's a really important leader,
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a real visionary, forward-thinking man,
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and he told me two things when I approached him.
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He said, "Greg, there's two things I'd like you to do.
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One is, remember I'm a politician,
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so you've got to go out and work with my ministers
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and convince the people of Kiribati that this is a good idea.
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Secondly, I'd like you to create principles
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that will transcend my own presidency.
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I don't want to do something like this
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if it's going to go away after I'm voted out of office."
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So we had very strong leadership, very good vision
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and a lot of science, a lot of lawyers involved.
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Many, many steps were taken to pull this off.
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And it was primarily because Kiribati realized
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that this was in their own self-interest to do this.
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They realized that this was a common cause
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that they had found
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with the conservation community.
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Then in 2002,
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when this was all going full-swing,
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a coral-bleaching event happened in the Phoenix Islands.
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Here's this resource that we're looking to save,
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and it turns out it's the hottest heating event
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that we can find on record.
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The ocean heated up as it does sometimes,
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and the hot spot formed and stalled
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right over the Phoenix Islands for six months.
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It was over 32 degrees Celsius for six months
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and it basically killed
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60 percent of the coral.
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So suddenly we had this area that we were protecting,
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but now it appeared to be dead, at least in the coral areas.
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Of course the deep-sea areas and the open ocean areas were fine,
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but the coral, which everybody likes to look at, was in trouble.
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Well, the good news is it's recovered
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and recovering fast,
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faster than any reef we've seen.
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This picture was just taken by Brian Skerry a few months ago
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when we returned to the Phoenix Islands
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and discovered that, because it is a protected area
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and has healthy fish populations
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that keep the algae grazed down
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and keep the rest of the reef healthy,
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the coral is booming, is just booming back.
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It's almost like if a person
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has multiple diseases,
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it's hard to get well, you might die,
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but if you only have one disease to deal with, you can get better.
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And that's the story with climate-change heating.
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It's the only threat,
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the only influence that the reef had to deal with.
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There was no fishing, there was no pollution, there was no coastal development,
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and the reef is on a full-bore recovery.
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Now I remember that dinner I had with the Minister of Fisheries 10 years ago
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when we first brought this up and I got quite animated during the dinner
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and said, "Well, I think that the conservation community
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might embrace this idea, Minister."
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He paused and put his hands together and said,
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"Yes, Greg,
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but the devil will be in the details," he said.
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And it certainly was.
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The last 10 years have been detail after detail
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ranging from creating legislation
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to multiple research expeditions
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to communication plans,
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as I said, teams of lawyers,
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MOUs,
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creating the Phoenix Islands Trust Board.
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And we are now in the process of raising the full endowment.
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Kiribati has frozen extracting activities
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at its current state while we raise the endowment.
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We just had our first PIPA Trust Board meeting three weeks ago.
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So it's a fully functional
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up-and-running entity
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that negotiates the reverse fishing license with the country.
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And the PIPA Trust Board holds that license
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and pays the country for this.
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So it's a very solid, very well thought-out,
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very well grounded system,
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and it was a bottom-up system,
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and that was very important with this work,
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from the bottom up to secure this.
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So the conditions for success here are listed.
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You can read them yourselves.
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But I would say the most important one in my mind
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was working within the market forces
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of the situation.
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And that insured that we could move this forward
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and it would have both the self-interest of Kiribati
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as well as the self-interest of the world.
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And I'll leave you with one final slide,
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that is: how do we scale this up?
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How do we realize Sylvia's dream?
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Where eventually do we take this?
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Here's the Pacific
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with large MPAs
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and large conservation zones on it.
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And as you can see,
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we have a patchwork across this ocean.
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I've just described to you the one story
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behind that rectangular area in the middle, the Phoenix Islands,
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but every other green patch on that
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has its own story.
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And what we need to do now
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is look at the whole Pacific Ocean
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in its entirety
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and make a network of MPAs
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across the Pacific
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so that we have our world's largest ocean
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protected and self-sustaining
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over time.
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Thank you very much. (Applause)
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