Cook Island Marine Park Director Fired After Email Supporting 10-Year Seafloor Mining Ban
For somebody who’d just been fired from a prestigious government post, Jacqueline Evans sounded remarkably upbeat. “I knew it was going to come,” she laughed during a phone interview with Mongabay. “I was surprised about what I was being sacked over, though: it was essentially just giving my opinion.”
On Sept. 20 Evans was dismissed from her position as director of the Cook Islands’ world-renowned Marae Moana marine protected area (MPA), a position she’d held since the MPA was enshrined into law in 2017. Evans, a marine scientist and 2019 winner of the prestigious international Goldman Prize for grassroots environmentalists, played a key leadership role in the seven-year campaign to establish Marae Moana, the biggest mixed-use MPA in the world at nearly 2 million square kilometers (772,200 square miles).
Ben Ponia, Prime Minister Henry Puna’s chief of staff, dismissed Evans. Evans said she’d seen it coming since Ponia, who had opposed Marae Moana since its inception, was appointed to the role a year ago. “I was kind of expecting it since he was appointed,” she said, “but I decided I was just going to stick it out and do as best as I could. And then the inevitable happened!” Ponia has declined to comment to the media on the matter, and did not respond directly to Mongabay’s request for comment.
According to Evans, in the days prior to her firing, she advised the government via an internal email to support a 10-year moratorium on seabed mining across the entire Pacific Ocean. The Fijian prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, had called for the moratorium at the Pacific Islands Forum in Tuvalu on Aug. 13, after civil society representatives suggested it to the leaders during a dialogue. The idea was then included in a draft communiqué for an upcoming meeting of environment ministers from various Pacific island countries. That draft was circulated among Cook Islands government ministers several weeks before Evans was brought into the discussion, she said in a public statement issued on Oct. 1. The ministers expressed the view that the communiqué should omit any mention of the moratorium; Evans advised the opposite.
EDIT
https://news.mongabay.com/2019/10/cook-islands-mpa-leader-fired-after-supporting-seabed-mining-freeze/
