The review, led by Danian Singh of the University of Auckland with colleagues Meg Parsons and Karen Fisher, employed an integrative critical narrative review methodology, combining a structured Boolean search of Scopus and Google Scholar with targeted retrieval of grey literature from Pacific regional agencies and national adaptation plans. After screening, the authors identified a core corpus of thirty-four empirical studies of gendered traditional knowledge, most published since 2020 and concentrated in Fiji and the Solomon Islands, which they read alongside twenty-five theoretical, comparative and policy works. The analysis was framed by feminist political ecology and decolonial scholarship, and the authors were explicit about their own positionality as partial insiders and outsiders to the communities whose knowledge they synthesised.

Geographically, the review resists treating the Pacific as an ecological monolith. Its primary evidence comes from the volcanic high islands of Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, where larger land areas, richer soils and extensive reef and mangrove systems shape one set of gendered knowledge practices. Against this, the authors set the low-lying atolls of Kiribati as a deliberate analytical counterpoint, where acute groundwater vulnerability and constrained nearshore gleaning grounds produce adaptive practices that differ in kind rather than merely in degree. This comparative design guards against the common error of generalising from Melanesian cases to atoll nations facing fundamentally different ecological constraints.

The first domain of evidence concerns agriculture and food security. Across Fiji, Tonga and Samoa, the literature documents a culturally defined division of labour in which men typically undertake land clearing and large-scale cropping while women manage household gardens, seed selection, weeding and the maintenance of crop diversity. In Fiji, women cultivate quick-maturing tuber crops to avert shortages and restore farms after cyclones, and on Totoya Island they combine traditional food-processing knowledge with solar-drying technology to produce cassava and breadfruit flour that substitutes for imported wheat. During cyclone seasons, Fijian women have been documented preserving cassava through traditional drying techniques and drawing on drought-resistant crops such as wild yams and sweet potatoes that remain available when water is scarce.

The Tongan case reveals both the depth of this expertise and its colonial reshaping. Before colonisation, Tongan agroforestry cultivated root crops, trees and shrubs together in mutually sustaining systems of nutrient exchange, pest defence and climate buffering, a system progressively displaced by commercially promoted monocropping. Within the customary arrangement, men cultivated the plants while women transformed them through cooking, medicine and the making of koloa, the valued textiles that secure social relationships, so that food security rested on the interlocking of both genders’ contributions. Development interventions, however, misread these arrangements entirely, promoting an urban horticulture that encouraged women to plant Western vegetables in house plots never organised for food provisioning, on the mistaken assumption that Tongan women gardened on a Western model.

The second domain concerns water and marine resources, where women’s knowledge is perhaps most consequential and most invisible. Women’s knowledge of traditional well locations enables communities to find potable water during droughts, while in coastal Fiji’s Bua Province, women proved more likely than men to identify medicinal uses of mangroves, including seedling preparations used to treat children’s coughs and disinfect wounds. Elder women in the villages of Navunievu and Denimanu articulated mangroves’ coastal protection role in vernacular terms, describing how they hold the soil together, and recalled which species best stabilise eroding shorelines, guiding younger women to plant them in vulnerable areas. Meanwhile, the customary tabu system of temporary closures, including a five-year closure reported to have restored sea cucumber and fish populations, fuses ecological and cultural functions in ways formal marine protected areas rarely achieve.

Gleaning, the collection of shellfish, crabs and seaweed from shallow reefs and mangroves, is predominantly practised by women and functions as a disaster-resilience mechanism. In Kiribati, women use finely tuned techniques passed down through generations, watching for telltale holes, bubbles in the sand and particular tidal patterns, and employing specialised methods such as wai ibo and the nocturnal luring of ghost crabs. Elders emphasise that gleaning becomes crucial after storms, when open-sea fishing is dangerous and marine organisms wash into the shallows. Yet a Solomon Islands study found that women’s exclusion from marine governance led them to breach local management rules, because closures had been sited on their customary fishing grounds without their input, eroding both equity and the legitimacy of conservation itself. Researchers have coined the term womangroves to describe how women’s mangrove-based food knowledge is rendered peripheral within a conservation discourse oriented towards male-dominated fisheries and timber.

The third and fourth domains cover disaster risk awareness and caregiving. Women in rural Fiji read unusual flowering times and shifts in lunar cycles as early signs of droughts, floods or cyclones, complementing men’s knowledge of offshore fishing and infrastructure repair, and sustaining the solesolevaki system of pooled labour that becomes a lifeline during crises. After Tropical Cyclone Winston, women in several Fijian villages were among the first to undertake reconstruction, with rapid recovery attributed partly to collective care and local leadership. In Samoa, fa’afafine performed both men’s and women’s roles in disaster response after the 2009 tsunami, yet binary-organised evacuation facilities excluded some from aid distribution, illustrating how gender-blind planning fails even those who contribute most.

The review’s central argument is that these patterns of exclusion are not incidental but the contemporary expression of colonial restructurings of gender and authority. Colonialism and missionary Christianity displaced arrangements in which Pacific women held authority over land, food production and ritual life, imposing patriarchal norms and undermining matrilineal inheritance. Those legacies persist in governance structures that engage male chiefs and elders as the relevant knowledge holders, systematically omitting women’s expertise in agroecology, water security and medicinal plants. The authors warn that incorporating traditional knowledge without a gender lens risks maladaptation, since locally led governance that is not gender-inclusive may simply relocate the exclusion of women’s knowledge rather than remedy it.

The policy implications are concrete. The authors call for institutionalising women’s genuine decision-making power rather than token representation, adjusting consultation processes to address practical constraints of timing, language and childcare, documenting gendered knowledge through community-led oral history and seasonal calendars under protocols that secure Indigenous ownership, and designing adaptation to empower rather than overburden women, whose unpaid labour already sustains community resilience. Knowledge transmission itself faces compound threats from commercialisation, migration and the erosion of customary leadership, meaning that marginalisation and loss reinforce each other across generations. Centring gender in Pacific climate adaptation, the review concludes, is both an equity imperative and a practical pathway to more effective and just resilience, because a community that consults only half its knowledge holders forfeits half its capacity to survive what is coming.

Subject of Research: Gendered traditional knowledge in Pacific Island climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction

Article Title: Gendering traditional knowledge in Pacific climate adaptation and disaster management: a critical narrative review

Article References: Singh, D., Parsons, M., & Fisher, K. (2026). Gendering traditional knowledge in Pacific climate adaptation and disaster management: a critical narrative review. Regional Environmental Change, 26(4), Article 204. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-026-02676-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10113-026-02676-x

Keywords: traditional knowledge, Pacific Islands, climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction, gender, Indigenous knowledge, food security, marine resources, mangroves, colonial legacies, maladaptation, Fiji

The material at the heart of the study is a covalent organic framework, or COF, built from two molecular building blocks: 1,3,5-tris-(4-aminophenyl)triazine, abbreviated TAPT, and 5,5′-diformyl-2,2′-bipyridine, abbreviated DFBP. These units condense into a rigid, porous, crystalline polymer whose periodic lattice is studded with nitrogen-rich sites that can chelate uranyl ions from solution. COFs have long been attractive for photocatalysis because their ordered conjugated structures absorb light and generate electron-hole pairs efficiently. The problem, the researchers explain, is that in most designs the photogenerated electrons wander randomly through the framework, recombining with holes before they can reach the atomic active sites where uranyl reduction and capture actually happen. Directional induction of photoelectron transport to those atomic sites, they note, has remained a grand challenge in photocatalytic uranium extraction.

The team’s solution was to engineer localized potential wells directly into the framework. These wells are regions of the lattice where the electronic energy landscape dips below that of the surrounding structure, acting like a series of tiny valleys that funnel photogenerated electrons downhill toward the catalytic centers. According to the authors, the construction of these localized potential wells induces multiple electron transport paths toward the atomic active sites, which facilitates the separation of photogenerated electron-hole pairs and enhances photocatalytic uranium extraction from natural seawater. In effect, rather than relying on chance encounters between mobile electrons and uranium-binding sites, the material builds an electrical roadmap that guides charge carriers to their destination.

The performance figures are striking. The optimized TAPT-DFBP COF achieved an average uranium extraction rate of 7.25 milligrams of uranium per gram of material per day, a figure the team reports as higher than those of previously reported active materials. Even more compelling is the demonstration at scale: the researchers fabricated a large-area COF film measuring 150 centimeters by 250 centimeters, an industrial-level dimension that dwarfs most laboratory photocatalyst samples, and deployed it in a flow-through extraction system in real marine environments. That film achieved a photocatalytic uranium extraction capacity of 8.9 milligrams per gram, showing that the laboratory mechanism survives contact with the far messier chemistry of actual seawater, with its competing ions, dissolved organic matter and biofouling organisms.

To understand why the potential wells work, the team deployed a battery of photophysical and computational investigations, including carrier dynamics measurements, characterization of electronic excited states, and density functional theory calculations using the PBE0 functional. These analyses revealed that the potential wells reshape the excited-state landscape of the framework, promoting spatial separation between electrons and holes and opening multiple conduction pathways rather than a single, easily congested route. Electron paramagnetic resonance and related spectroscopic probes tracked how electrons accumulated at active sites and were transferred to adsorbed uranyl species, converting soluble hexavalent uranium into extractable reduced forms deposited on the framework. The bipyridine nitrogen sites serve double duty, both anchoring uranyl ions within reach of the electron pathways and helping define the local energy minima that pull electrons inward.

The broader context makes the advance significant. Uranium is the irreplaceable fuel of nuclear power, and terrestrial reserves, while substantial, are finite and geopolitically concentrated. Seawater represents the ultimate backstop resource, but extracting uranium at parts-per-billion concentrations economically has defeated many approaches, from the amidoxime fiber adsorbents developed by Japanese researchers in the early 2000s to more recent bioinspired membranes, biomimetic nanochannels and uranyl-imprinted nanocages. Cost analyses of braided polymer adsorbent systems have historically suggested that seawater uranium would be far more expensive than mined uranium. Photocatalytic strategies aim to change the economics by using sunlight to actively convert and immobilize uranyl rather than passively waiting for diffusion to a binding site, and the new work shows how to maximize that solar advantage at the level of individual charge carriers.

What distinguishes this study from prior photocatalytic efforts is the explicit engineering of the material’s internal electric field topology. Earlier approaches tuned local charge distribution in multicomponent COFs or built donor-acceptor architectures, often borrowing from the design principles that have advanced artificial photosynthesis of hydrogen peroxide. The localized potential well strategy generalizes that logic: instead of optimizing bulk band structure, it inserts deterministic sinks into the energy landscape that act on every photogenerated electron. Because the wells are built into the covalent connectivity of the lattice rather than grafted onto its surface, they are stable, uniform and compatible with the film-processing chemistry needed for large-area manufacturing, which the 150-by-250-centimeter film demonstrates convincingly.

The practical implications extend beyond uranium. The same principle of directional electron funneling could enhance photocatalytic reactions in which charge carrier recombination is the bottleneck, including hydrogen peroxide photosynthesis, carbon dioxide fixation and hydrogen evolution, all areas where COFs have shown promise. For nuclear energy planners, a sunlight-driven adsorbent that works in real seawater and can be produced in industrial-scale sheets represents a tangible step toward seawater uranium becoming a genuine strategic reserve rather than a laboratory curiosity. The researchers acknowledge that economic deployment will still require durable materials that resist biofouling and can be regenerated repeatedly, and the study’s mechanistic framework provides a rational basis for iterating on those designs.

The study, which received support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Key R&D Program of China and several other national and provincial programs, was published in Nature Water on 9 September 2026 after peer review by Costas Tsouris, Xiangke Wang and Wenkun Zhu. By showing that the fate of a photogenerated electron can be programmed into the very architecture of a crystalline polymer, the team has turned a fundamental physical chemistry insight into a working technology for one of the most coveted resources in the ocean. If the rates achieved in this demonstration can be maintained over long deployment cycles, the vast uranium wealth dissolved in seawater may finally begin to look less like an untouchable dream and more like an addressable reservoir for the nuclear age.

Subject of Research: Photocatalytic uranium extraction from natural seawater using covalent organic frameworks with localized potential wells for directional electron transport

Article Title: Localized potential wells enabling directional electron transport boost photocatalytic uranium extraction from natural seawater

Article References: Xu, Y., Zhou, Z., Zhao, R., Guo, X., Wang, Y., Liu, Y., Lin, Z., Sun, Z., Yu, P., Luo, M., Wang, J., & Guo, S. (2026). Localized potential wells enabling directional electron transport boost photocatalytic uranium extraction from natural seawater. Nature Water. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44221-026-00685-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s44221-026-00685-y

Keywords: uranium extraction, seawater, photocatalysis, covalent organic frameworks, localized potential wells, electron transport, uranium mining, nuclear fuel, Nature Water, charge separation, COF film, marine resources