 When I was growing up, our relatives and our parents, they usually go out to the sea to get our food. So it is very important for our community. My name is Naomi Longa. I am the team leader of the Sea Woman of Melanesia program here in Kimbe, West New Britain province of Papua New Guinea. So my love for the ocean started when I was still a kid. So most of the days I used to spend my time in the sea swimming, looking at the corals, the fish. And I always wonder how they grow, how they, if they are living thing, then how they get their food from and why are they so beautiful in the water. I took out signs from there just to, just to know more about the sea. The Sea Woman of Melanesia started in 2016 by Dr. Andy Lewis. We empowered this woman by training them with basic reef survey technique so that they can be able to find an ideal area for marine reserve in their community. As I was travelling around Papua New Guinea over more than a decade in my work as an ecotourism guide, it was more often than not the young women in the villages which were coming up to me and talking to me about marine life and about marine conservation and what they could do to look after their own reefs. I looked at it and said, okay, what skills that I have can I bring to bear to try and make a difference here for the people and for the reefs and for this really quite important part of the world which really has the last great tract of high biodiversity reef in the world now, it's far too precious to lose. First of all, we usually do the snorkeling training and then once I see that the women are confident in the water then we go on and do the survey technique. After I train them, I can see a very big difference. They can now swim confidently in the water and they can ID the fish, they can identify the corals. Once they finish the training, they're going to go back to their own community and they're going to do the survey in their own reefs and they're going to talk to the village elders about what they learn. It now gives them the confidence to make decisions in their family, in their community and also it gives them the courage to talk about, you know, the resources that we depend on in our daily lives, like coral reefs. The coral triangle is being affected by climate change. There's no doubt we have seen thermal bleaching through that area but the bleaching we saw there in January 2021 was probably the most extensive. The communities were just wondering what's happening on the coral reefs but I knew that the corals were bleaching because they all turned white. And of course at that time there was very few recreational or scientific or expedition vessels in the area. When the event started, there was lockdown in all the provinces. Here in our own area, we have access to the sea, like we can easily go out. And so our Sea Women of Melanesia teams were on the ground, we had them kitted out with underwater cameras and so we were able to deploy them to a range of different locations through the Eastern Coral Triangle. I've never seen bleaching even before. The team in Millen Bay Province and Port Mores Bay and in Solomon Islands, they also went out and do the survey and they have noticed the bleaching. They were able to get really high quality imagery of the condition of the reefs which then they sent back to us and we were able to make an assessment of the severity of that bleaching. It was very important because it was probably some of the only information signed to be information that we had coming out of those areas. There was around about 50% to 60% of the corals on the reef were showing signs of bleaching stress. Looking at the imagery, probably about 10% of them may have gone on to die. After the bleaching, I went back and surveyed the reef and I saw that most of the corals, they survived the bleaching. So I was really happy about that. Climate change is a significant issue but in Melanesia by far the biggest issue is overfishing both by local people and by commercial elements, both within these countries and foreign fleets that are coming in. To create a reserve in my community, the next step is to talk to the communities about the benefits of marine reserve and we will have to hear from their perspective what they think. If they want to have a marine reserve then we're going to tell them that hey, we have the skills, we have cameras and we have GPS that we can do all the necessary things that we need to do to set up the reserve. So in my community, I'm pretty sure that they will be happy to have that reserve. When I go out and dive and see the coral reefs, I hope that we'll have more interest from communities as well. We can help them to get the benefits that the reserve is going to provide.