On the southeast coast of Rarotonga, the lagoon was dying by inches — choked with nitrates and phosphates coming from unsustainable coastal development leading to harmful nutrient-rich treated wastewater leaching underground to the lagoon, the reef's color dulling before Jacqueline's eyes. That moment did not just alarm her. It recruited her. "As human beings on this planet, we’re responsible for the damage we inflict on nature, she says. We have the responsibility to act." She acted for five years, village by village, until in July 2017 the Cook Islands enacted Marae Moana — sustainable management across the entirety of a 1.9-million-square-kilometre ocean territory, with fifty-nautical-mile zones around each of the fifteen islands closed to commercial fishing and seabed mining. It was grassroots diplomacy long before it was policy. "Establishing anything significant takes an enormous amount of time and patience, Jacqueline reflects. It requires a team, and it requires us to listen to everyday people." The 2019 Goldman Environmental Prize recognized what that patience built: the first such honor for a Cook Islander, and, later, the seed capital for her own Moana Foundation.
Building the region's missing architecture
Today, as Pacific Partnerships Director at the Wildlife Conservation Society and Chair of the Pacific Islands Roundtable for Nature Conservation (PIRT), Jacqueline works at a different scale — one country's exclusive economic zone traded for nineteen. The shift, she says, is architectural as much as geographic: "We already have intergovernmental regional architecture. We need to build our non-governmental regional architecture," she says — the working groups, the shared data, the accountability between organizations that turn a coalition into something that functions day to day, in service of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework's targets and the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent.
Where Nature-based Solutions must land
That scaffolding is where finance like the Kiwa Initiative's Nature-based Solutions funding is meant to land — not as an abstraction, but as mangrove seedlings and invasive-species removal reaching an outer island. Jacqueline insists the translation has to run through people, not terminology: a fisherman who wants more seabirds to know where and when to fish is already practicing an ecosystem approach, whether he knows the SDG number for it. "It really comes down to respect," she says of holding Indigenous and Western science together — the former, she argues, is also a science "developed after years and years of trial-and-error. Experimentation."
Widening the table
Asked what she wants the next generation of Pacific conservationists to inherit, Jacqueline doesn't point to a policy win. She points to whoever gets a seat. "I’d really like to expand membership of the Pacific Islands Roundtable, so we really get down to the grassroots communities, and young conservationists, so that they can have a voice in the regional planning and strategic development of nature conservation in the Pacific," she says — the same instinct that took her village to village in the Cook Islands for Marae Moana, now aimed at PIRT itself. "Rather than being a victim of climate change, the Pacific can demonstrate that we are leaders in addressing it", Jacqueline says. Asked, ahead of the Pacific Regional Pre-COP in October, for one message to carry to a global audience, she returned to the same argument at planetary scale: "It’s vital for the global community to recognize the Pacific Islands’ leadership in addressing climate change, the ocean’s role in this effort, and the need to maintain ocean integrity for our planet’s sustainability." A conviction she has carried out for the past twenty years, during which she has helped build institutions capable of putting it into practice, and demonstrating its impact.
