21 Mar 2013

Extractive industries urged to help sustainable development

8:29 pm on 21 March 2013

The United Nations Development Programme says countries in the Pacific want strong measures in place to ensure the region's extractive industries sector leads to sustainable development.

This follows a three-day meeting organised by the UNDP in Fiji and involved more than 60 participants from eight countries.

The UNDP's deputy director for the Asia Pacific, Nicholas Rosellini, says they brought these people together to identify the key challenges facing the sector and to outline the way forward.

"We basically want to make sure that human development and sustainable developments issues are at the heart of the discussion around extractive industries. So there are a number of areas of intervention needed and we discussed at the meeting some of the areas, such as the legal environment, the policy and legislative environment and then we also looked at how one uses the revenues."

The UNDP's Nicholas Rosellini.