At the Planning and Policy for Ecosystem-Based Management Forum held in January 2010, senior natural resource managers from eight Pacific Island countries endorsed the following guiding principles for EBM:  

• Embrace common policy
• Preserve options for the future
• Anticipate and prevent damage to the ecosystem and community
• Create incentives for stewardship and collaboration
• Make explicit tradeoffs based on best available socioeconomic and biophysical information
• Make decisions under uncertainty
• Integrate across sectors (e.g. fishing, mining, agriculture, public health, tourism, water quality)
• Apply lessons learned from management successes and failures, and from monitoring ecosystems
• Account for cumulative impacts within and across sectors
• Have sustained funding and support for implementation
• Include capacity to meet emerging issues and challenges.

The group will seek wider endorsement of the EBM concept over coming months which will encourage this approach to implementation across the Pacific.