For Vanuatu, there are some difficulties in obtaining environmental data from government agencies as the country does not have a data policy in place. We have a 'Right To Information Act', however, this legislation is quiet new and at times it does take a long time in order to obtain information/ data under this Act. However, I do think that if there is a national data policy in place, it would greatly help in clearly outlining the data sharing in government departments, and ministries. Furthermore, this will also help the Right To Information Act especially with access to environmental information for the public as well as government and non-government agencies.

For us from the Kingdom of Tonga there is a challenge on sharing of data or information. It is very hard to share the data unless if you had a strong networking with different stakeholders. For the data its belong to the Ministry and how we need to disseminate through the approval of the CEOʻs . However if we need the data from different Ministries sometimes they need incentives before sharing of their data.
I think we need the decision from the above on how to strengthen and a strong networking.

For the Cook Islands - In the past we use to have issues with data sharing among Government Ministries. But now each ministry and agencies are starting to work together to share data among each other so we don't multiple versions of the same dataset among each other. But this is still a work in progress here in the Cook Islands and hoping that we will come to an agreement between us all.

Latching onto Ben's response above regarding challenges sharing data across Government Ministries. One challenge is that ministries are hesitant to share the data due to concerns about how widely it may be accessed or interpreted by external parties. This can be addressed by developing a data sharing policy using SPREP's Data Sharing Policy template, also communicating the license levels.

In my line of work, i often have people inquiring about data that we don't actually have access to. For example, students who come wanting to do research and they are asking questions like how many children are born everyday? How many female? How many male? I would have to tell them to go to the Ministry of Home Affairs, they keep the data.
As the National Statistics Office with the official mandate to collect and disseminate data, i often think it would be so much more convenient for the country if we could centralise our office where all the data of all the Ministries are kept and are accessible to everyone. Anything regarding the Environment for example can only be accessed at the Ministry of Environment. We don't have access to it.