Govt plans to manage resources begins

The National National

By HELEN TARAWA
THE Government has started awareness on the implementation of its plans in managing natural resources for a more sustainable future.
A two-day workshop last week looked at the Government plans and policies linking them to the resources to ensure they benefited the people now and in the future.
Department of National Planning Secretary Hakaua Harry told the workshop that it was the first workshop to create awareness to ensure stakeholders understood their roles.
“Our country is blessed with natural resources and assets, we have water, biodiversity, fisheries, forestry that a lot of countries don’t have and we’d like to manage those assets,” Harry said.
“We’d like to manage that to be able to have a sustainable future so those are the plans that the government has right now.”
Harry said one of the important plans was Vision 2050 and the Strategy for Responsible Sustainable Development (StaRS).
“We have the vision documents, the overall planning document for the country translating the vision of the country into the tangible outcomes is the medium term development plan (MTDP),” she said.
“MTDP has the immediate priority of any government or the current government in the five-year period, it has priorities that government puts resources or budget against to implement, we have the national strategy for sustainable development plan.
“It’s a plan that clearly gives us a  clear understanding as to how we want to see the development going forward.
“We’ve been depending on the extractive industry for a while now to fund our budget to ensure that our people have the kind of life that we want.
“We’ve come with the national strategy for responsible sustainable development, it’s a paradigm shift from looking at depending on extractive industry to ensure that people take the responsibility of ensuring that they have a life that they want to live in and they are responsible.
“This workshop is to bring us together so we know the linkages and understand how SDGs fit into our own country plans.”