Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness Program: Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency Grant

Overview

The Pacific Maritime Domain Awareness Program (the program) aims to strengthen regional frameworks to enhance maritime domain awareness (MDA) and support Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA) members to detect and respond to illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and support wider law enforcement. This includes working with the FFA to bolster capabilities and share benefits from new and emerging MDA technologies with its members. The program is part of Australia’s support to the Pacific region to build regional capacity, capability, infrastructure and systems that strengthen regional cooperation to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing and transnational crime. It will complement Australia’s long-standing support for Pacific regional organisations and partnership with the FFA, including initiatives such as the Defence-led Pacific Maritime Security Program and the Indo-Pacific Partnership for Maritime Domain Awareness. The program follows a successful pilot in 2023 that provided commercially available satellite radio frequency data to the FFA’s Regional Fisheries Surveillance Centre. This grant opportunity will enable the FFA to provide continued MDA benefits for the region over four years from 2023-24 to 2026-27 under the program.