Joeli Veitayaki is the Strategic Adviser for Blue Prosperity Fiji, the Fiji Government led partnership with the Waitt Institute of the USA that is working on the articulation of Fiji’s National Ocean Policy through the use of Marine Spatial Planning to optimise the sustainable use of the nation’s marine space to support blue economy and sustainable fisheries.

Joeli has been a sustainable community development adviser for the last three decades. He was a former Head of the University of the South Pacific’s (USP) School of Marine Studies, was a member of the Panel of Experts for a Sustainable Ocean Economy and is a Co-Chair of the Korea-South Pacific Fisheries Forum (KOSOPFF).

Joeli is founder and leader of the Lomani Gau network, which promotes sustainable rural development in Gau Island and local communities in Fiji and the Pacific Islands, where natural resources are largely owned by indigenous communities. Community based management empower, engage and support local communities to protect and sustainably utilise their natural resources, which are under threat from unscrupulous partners that cheat their ill-informed and unsuspecting hosts. Joeli’s last two full years of his USP tenure was spent at the USP Samoa Campus in Apia where he was the Acting Campus Director, which allowed him to address some of the land based sources of threats to healthy and productive marine environment.

Joeli is currently developing the Vunilagi Demonstration Centre in Malawai Village in Gau to promote the: protection of native forest, rehabilitation of degraded farmlands and river banks and the introduction of sustainable technology and appropriate farming, building and water management practices that can still be used today. Adaptation measures tailor made for communities in Small Island Developing States are critical given the challenges that affect their effective implementation of resource management and conservation measures and indigenous peoples’ rights.