The research, led by Eunice Okyere and colleagues at Fiji National University, adopted a descriptive phenomenological approach to capture the lived experiences of 45 women with type-2 diabetes. Purposively selected from Suva and its neighboring suburbs of Lami, Nasinu, Nausori, and Tamavua, participants spanned diverse ethnic groups, ages, religions, and occupations. In-depth interviews lasting an average of 40 minutes were conducted from August to October 2022 using a semi-structured guide, with data saturation reached by the 39th interview. Inductive thematic analysis then distilled the narratives into three overarching themes: the perceived impact of the pandemic on diabetes management, coping strategies, and recommended interventions.

The findings paint a stark picture of disrupted care. Many participants reported limited access to healthcare workers and diabetes supplies, as clinicians were occupied with COVID-19 cases. Scheduled appointments were canceled or postponed, eroding confidence in service delivery and, in some tragic instances, contributing to death. One participant recounted how her sister, also diabetic, died after her initial appointment to see a doctor was postponed. Physical activity patterns changed as fear of infection kept women indoors, while job losses during the pandemic made it difficult to maintain standard diets rich in fruits and vegetables. These disruptions culminated in diabetes complications, including amputations and worsening mental health.

Participants described how the pandemic’s restrictions increased stress and anxiety, conditions already more prevalent among individuals with type-2 diabetes than the general population. The SARS-CoV-2 virus itself induces hyperglycemia, leading to immune dysfunction and heightened vulnerability to infections and long-term diabetes complications. In the early phase of the pandemic, people with type-2 diabetes accounted for approximately one-third of COVID-19 deaths. Fiji’s government classified individuals with diabetes as a high-risk group, a designation that, combined with lockdown measures, could negatively impact self-management. The situation is compounded by the fact that an estimated thirty percent of the Fijian population is diagnosed with diabetes, with diabetic foot amputations occurring approximately once every eight hours.

Coping strategies emerged as a central theme. Emotional eating was widespread, with many women consuming food to suppress negative feelings such as loneliness, sadness, and fear, leading to excessive weight gain and, in some cases, new-onset high blood pressure. Religious practices, including prayer, meditation, and listening to gospel music, provided strength and resilience, with some joining online church services when face-to-face worship was impossible. Family support proved vital, as relatives sent food and money to sustain those who had lost jobs. However, some participants turned to herbal medications, either by preference or because healthcare workers were unavailable, raising safety concerns about unsupervised traditional remedies.

The women recommended several interventions to improve diabetes management during crises. Financial support schemes topped the list, enabling those who lost income to purchase nutritious foods. Participants also called for accessible specialized healthcare services, with specific health workers assigned to diabetic patients during emergencies. Intensifying diabetes self-care education was deemed essential, particularly to correct misconceptions about COVID-19 and diabetes and to address the risks of emotional eating and unauthorized herbal use. Many expressed greater trust in information from healthcare workers than from the media, which they said sometimes spread misleading content causing fear and panic.

Virtual clinics and door-to-door delivery of diabetes supplies were highlighted as promising models. Though most women preferred face-to-face consultations, they acknowledged that telephone or online communication could have addressed delayed access during the pandemic, improved health status, and increased digital literacy. Fiji serves as the digital hub for the Pacific, supported by advanced subsea cables and expanding mobile networks, yet challenges in rural internet connectivity persist. The study underscores that continuity of care during emergencies requires a multifaceted approach integrating preparedness, sustainable and coordinated healthcare services, and decentralized digital care models.

The findings carry implications for policy makers and health managers across the Pacific Islands, where diabetes remains the primary cause of premature death and where nine of the ten nations with the highest prevalence of diabetes and obesity in women are located. The geographical position of Fiji, its vast maritime landscape, climate change, and natural disasters further complicate equitable health service delivery. Strengthening education on diabetes management, providing mental health support, and establishing systems for home delivery of medications and glucometers could mitigate the burden of comorbidities, enhance glycemic control, and reduce the risk of severe complications in future crises.

Ultimately, the study highlights the need for stakeholders to ensure better access to healthcare services, providers, and essential supplies for women with type-2 diabetes. By implementing interventions such as virtual clinics, home deliveries, and intensified self-care education, health systems can safeguard continuity of care during emergencies and prevent the behavioral and safety issues that arise when routine management falters. As the world prepares for future pandemics, the experiences of these Fij{

Subject of Research: COVID-19 pandemic and type-2 diabetes management among women in Fiji

Article Title: COVID-19 pandemic and the management of type-2 diabetes mellitus among women in Fiji: concerns and context specific interventions

Article References: Okyere, E., Marfoh, K., Goundar, R., Makutu, L., & Kabukeinamala, D. (2026). COVID-19 pandemic and the management of type-2 diabetes mellitus among women in Fiji: concerns and context specific interventions. Frontiers in Clinical Diabetes and Healthcare, 7, Article 1846673. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcdhc.2026.1846673

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcdhc.2026.1846673

Keywords: COVID-19, type-2 diabetes, Fiji, women's health, qualitative research, telemedicine, diabetes self-management, herbal medicine, emotional eating, virtual clinics, Pacific Islands, healthcare access

The research team, led by Kar Hau Chong and Zoe Power, co-first authors affiliated with the University of Wollongong, together with colleagues including Anthony D. Okely and collaborators in the Marshall Islands, Australia and the United States, analysed questionnaire responses from 1970 students in Grades 7 to 12 across 26 secondary schools. Girls made up 51.6 percent of the analytical sample. The Global Youth Tobacco Survey, administered anonymously and self-completed by students, is not typically associated with physical activity research, yet its structured items on exercise, sedentary time and sleep allowed the investigators to construct a rare nationally representative picture of movement behaviours in a small island developing state. Using survey-weighted descriptive statistics and generalised linear models, the team estimated the prevalence of each behaviour and tested how they varied by sex and age.

The headline number is unambiguous. While only 0.8 percent of adolescents achieved the 60-minute daily threshold of moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity, or MVPA, 53.5 percent managed that level of exertion on at least one day per week. The gap between the two figures tells the central story: many Marshallese teenagers do exercise, but almost none sustain it at the frequency and consistency that international guidelines recommend. Confidence intervals around the daily estimate, ranging from 0.4 to 2.0 percent, make clear that even at the upper bound the adherence rate would remain extraordinary low. For a measure that sits at the foundation of paediatric health guidance worldwide, the result signals a population-wide shortfall rather than the failure of a small subgroup.

Beneath the headline figure, the study documented similarly discouraging patterns across the other pillars of healthy movement. Roughly one third of adolescents engaged in muscle-strengthening activities on three or more days per week, with the survey recording 30.4 percent. Active school transport, meaning walking or cycling to and from school, was reported by 32.6 percent on at least three days weekly. Sedentary behaviour told the inverse story: 44.6 percent of adolescents accumulated three or more hours of leisure-time sitting per day, a level the researchers classified as high. Sleep fared little better, with only 44.2 percent meeting the age-specific duration recommendations of at least nine hours for those aged 11 to 13 and at least eight hours for those aged 14 to 18. Taken together, the data indicate that a large majority of young Marshallese fall short on at least one of the three behaviours that jointly define the 24-hour movement guidelines adopted in many countries.

The sex differences mapped onto familiar global patterns but carried distinctive local texture. Boys demonstrated higher participation in moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity than girls, consistent with trends seen across most of the world, while girls reported higher levels of sedentary behaviour. The researchers went further than simple comparisons, however, by testing for sex-by-age interactions and finding statistically significant interplay between the two factors across every physical activity behaviour they measured. Older boys, those above 14 years of age, consistently showed higher odds of participation than younger boys. This developmental gradient suggests that whatever drives adolescent boys in the Marshall Islands toward greater activity, it strengthens with age rather than fading, a pattern that could prove important for designing interventions timed to particular school years.

Age itself emerged as a powerful organising variable. Older adolescents, defined in the study as those over 14, generally showed higher participation in moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity and higher sedentary behaviour, and they were more likely than younger teens to obtain sufficient sleep. The combination is intriguing: the same group that moves more during the day also sits more and, paradoxically, sleeps better. The authors interpret these divergences as evidence that any effort to promote healthy movement in the Marshall Islands will need to be age- and sex-responsive, since a single uniform programme would miss the very different starting points of a 12-year-old girl and a 17-year-old boy. The findings provide baseline evidence intended to inform future surveillance and targeted strategy development in the nation.

The significance of the study extends beyond the Marshall Islands’ own borders. Pacific nations remain conspicuously underrepresented in the global movement behaviour literature, a gap the authors set out to close. Small island developing states in Micronesia and across Oceania rarely appear in the large multi-country surveillance datasets that shape international guidelines, which means their adolescent populations are often invisible in the evidence base used to allocate global health resources. By drawing on a nationally representative sample and applying rigorous survey-weighted analysis, the study demonstrates that such data can be generated even in nations with small populations and dispersed island geographies, and it establishes a reference point against which future Marshallese surveys, including those based on the Global School-Based Student Health Survey, can be compared.

Methodologically, the study is careful about what its data can and cannot say. As a cross-sectional analysis, it captures a single moment in time and cannot establish causal relationships between age, sex and behaviour. The measures were self-reported, which introduces the possibility of recall and social desirability bias, though the anonymous, self-administered format of the questionnaire is designed to reduce such distortions. The analytical sample of 1970 students came from the 2479 students in Grades 7 to 12 who were invited to participate across 26 secondary schools, and the survey covered school-going adolescents only, meaning those outside formal education were not represented. The survey’s conduct was approved by the Marshall Islands Ministry of Health and Human Services and the Ministry of Education, with passive parental consent obtained before data collection, and the secondary analysis received ethical approval from the University of Wollongong Human Research Ethics Committee.

The behavioural profile documented in the study matters because physical activity, sedentary time and sleep in adolescence are linked in the broader scientific literature to cardiometabolic health, mental wellbeing and the trajectories that carry into adulthood. The Republic of the Marshall Islands, a nation of low-lying atolls in the central Pacific, faces environmental and economic pressures that shape daily life on its islands, and the study’s findings give its health and education ministries a quantified starting point for action. The researchers explicitly frame the work as baseline evidence for surveillance, and the use of the Global Youth Tobacco Survey infrastructure hints at a practical pathway: existing school-based survey mechanisms can carry movement behaviour questions at little additional cost, allowing repeated measurement over time.

What emerges from the data is both a warning and an opportunity. The warning is stark: fewer than one in a hundred Marshallese adolescents meets the daily activity threshold, nearly half sit for three or more leisure hours a day, and more than half do not get the sleep their bodies require. The opportunity lies in the patterns within the numbers. Older boys are already moving more, girls’ higher sedentary time marks a clear target, and the strong age gradients suggest that interventions can be timed and tailored with precision. For a nation whose young people will determine its future, the study provides something indispensable, an honest, nationally representative accounting of where they stand today, and a map of the differences by sex and age that any successful effort to help them move more, sit less and sleep better will need to navigate.

Subject of Research: Prevalence of physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep among adolescents in the Republic of the Marshall Islands

Article Title: Prevalence of movement behaviours among adolescents in the Republic of the Marshall Islands: a nationally representative study

Article References: Chong, K. H., Power, Z., Smith, T., Chimedtseren, N., Partridge, S. R., Novotny, R., & Okely, A. D. (2026). Prevalence of movement behaviours among adolescents in the Republic of the Marshall Islands: a nationally representative study. Journal of Activity, Sedentary and Sleep Behaviors. https://doi.org/10.1186/s44167-026-00118-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s44167-026-00118-x

Keywords: physical activity, sedentary behaviour, sleep, adolescents, Marshall Islands, Pacific Islands, Micronesia, public health, surveillance, MVPA, movement behaviours, youth health

The moral arithmetic of the Pacific situation is stark. Pacific Island countries contribute just 0.02 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet their communities have long ranked among those most acutely harmed by the consequences of a changing climate. Rising seas, intensifying storms, shifting rainfall patterns and warming oceans are transforming coastlines, food systems and freshwater supplies across the region. Hosting negotiations in this setting forces delegates to confront the human stakes of their decisions directly, rather than through the abstract language of tonnes of carbon and degrees of warming that has traditionally dominated conference halls.

Health, the authors argue, provides perhaps the most immediate and human barometer of the escalating crisis. Across the Pacific, climate change is increasing risks to food and water security, altering patterns of vector-borne, food-borne and water-borne disease, exposing populations to extreme heat, eroding mental health and wellbeing, and placing additional pressure on health services that are already stretched thin. These impacts are not evenly distributed. Displacement separates people from land, culture and identity, while damage to ecosystems undermines traditional sources of food, livelihoods and knowledge. Climate impacts deepen existing inequities, including those experienced by women, children, older people, people with disabilities and communities with the fewest resources to adapt.

The physical vulnerability of the region’s health infrastructure illustrates the problem in concrete terms. A review of 76 hospitals across 14 Pacific island countries found that 62 percent were located within 500 metres of the sea or a river, making them particularly susceptible to damage from sea level rise and storm surges. In other words, the very institutions charged with protecting communities from climate-related harm are themselves in the front line. Conventional measures of climate change, which typically track emissions and temperature anomalies, often fail to capture these true losses to communities, and the authors argue that such dimensions should influence not only how consequences are described but how solutions are designed.

The Pacific has not waited for the international community to act. For decades, Pacific countries have demonstrated global climate leadership, from Fiji’s presidency of COP23 and the development of the Talanoa Dialogue to some of the world’s strongest advocacy for ambitious mitigation, adaptation and climate justice. Across the region, governments and communities are shaping health national adaptation plans, strengthening climate-informed surveillance, making health facilities more resilient, improving water security and introducing renewable energy into health infrastructure. Fiji has helped pioneer climate-resilient and environmentally sustainable health-care facilities, offering a working model of what adaptation looks like when it is embedded in health systems rather than bolted on afterwards.

Regional innovation has also demonstrated that climate action and health improvement are mutually reinforcing. Across the Western Pacific, a recent Climate and Health Co-Benefits Challenge documented how action outside the health sector, from cleaner energy and transport to healthier food systems and urban planning, can simultaneously reduce emissions and improve health. Eliminating fossil fuel combustion delivers cleaner air and fewer deaths from air pollution. Designing cities and towns around public and active transport reduces emissions while increasing physical activity, improving mental health and reducing noncommunicable disease. More sustainable food systems ease environmental pressures while addressing malnutrition, and better-designed homes, workplaces and communities can protect people from extreme heat and cold.

The authors describe these gains not merely as co-benefits but as core benefits: tangible returns from climate investment that people can experience now, rather than promises deferred to future generations. This reframing carries significant implications for negotiation strategy. Health, they argue, cannot be seen only as a sector requiring urgent protection from climate change. It is also one of the strongest drivers of climate ambition and a measurable indicator of successful climate action. Framing climate policy in terms of lives saved and communities strengthened may prove more persuasive, and more politically durable, than framing it solely in terms of avoided emissions.

From this analysis, the article distils three priorities that the Pre-COP should carry from the Pacific to COP31 and beyond. First, health should be recognised as a powerful driver of climate action and a defining measure of climate ambition and accountability. Climate policies should be assessed not only by tonnes of emissions avoided but by whether they protect lives and create healthier, safer and more resilient communities. Integrating health across adaptation, mitigation and resilience planning, Nationally Determined Contributions, and the second Global Stocktake, which will commence at COP31, can help build public support, strengthen the case for investment and accelerate climate action.

Second, climate-health commitments must be translated into investment and implementation. Despite the scale of the threat, health attracts less than 0.5 percent of multilateral climate finance, a figure the authors present as grossly disproportionate to the burden. Investment is needed in climate-resilient health facilities, climate-informed surveillance and early-warning systems, health workforces, water and sanitation, and community resilience, the foundations that allow health services to continue functioning when climate shocks occur. Climate finance should also better recognise and measure the health gains delivered through investments in energy, food systems and sustainable transport, while access to climate finance for health must become simpler and more responsive to the needs of climate-vulnerable countries, particularly small island states, with support to ensure absorptive capacity, effective implementation and infrastructure sustainability.

Third, those most affected must help shape the response. Women and girls frequently experience disproportionate health and social consequences from climate shocks while remaining underrepresented in decision making, and the authors argue that Indigenous knowledge, Pacific knowledge systems and the experiences of communities living at the climate frontier should inform policy and investment. A more equitable climate response, they stress, is not achieved simply by identifying vulnerable populations; it requires sharing power with them in designing solutions. The Pacific tradition of talanoa, an inclusive dialogue grounded in listening, storytelling and collective understanding, offers an appropriate model for these discussions, and the international community should arrive in the Pacific prepared not only to speak but to listen.

The journey from the Pacific to COP31 must ultimately be about implementation, the authors conclude. Governments already possess substantial evidence of the dangers of climate change; what communities need now is action on a scale commensurate with those dangers. Health can help bridge that gap because it translates degrees of warming, tonnes of carbon and financing commitments into outcomes that matter in people’s daily lives. It can demonstrate that climate action is not solely about avoiding a more dangerous future but about enjoying healthier societies today. When the world gathers in the Pacific this October, success should be measured not only by the ambition of the commitments made but by what those commitments ultimately mean for people, because a healthier future and a safer climate, the authors write, go hand in hand.

Subject of Research: The role of health in Pacific climate diplomacy ahead of COP31

Article Title: When global climate diplomacy comes to the Pacific, health must be at the table

Article References: Lalabalavu, R. A. R., Demaio, S., Jacobs, M., Bennett, E., & Piukala, S. M. (2026). When global climate diplomacy comes to the Pacific, health must be at the table. The Lancet Regional Health – Western Pacific, Article 102003. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.102003

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.lanwpc.2026.102003

Keywords: climate change, Pacific Islands, COP31, global health, climate finance, health adaptation, talanoa dialogue, UNFCCC, health equity, climate resilience, small island states, air pollution

The core idea behind downscaling is deceptively simple. Global climate models divide the planet into grid cells that are typically one hundred kilometres or more across, a resolution at which coastlines, mountain ranges, and individual thunderstorms are essentially invisible. Regional climate models take the large-scale output from these global models and re-simulate it over a smaller domain at much finer resolution, adding back the topographic and coastal complexity that shapes local weather. In Australasia, where the Great Dividing Range, the complex coastline of Bass Strait, and the steep rainfall gradients of the tropical north all exert powerful influences on climate, this added detail is not a luxury but a necessity for credible projections.

The CORDEX-Australasia programme has now completed successive ensembles based on the fifth and sixth phases of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, known respectively as CORDEX-CMIP5 and CORDEX-CMIP6. These coordinated collections of regional simulations, produced by modelling groups across Australia and beyond, allow scientists to separate the robust signals of climate change from the noise of model-to-model differences. The synthesis of this fifteen-year effort, published in PLOS Climate by Jason Evans of the University of New South Wales and a large team of collaborators from institutions across the region, documents both the scientific achievements and the formidable challenges that remain.

One of the clearest findings to emerge from the programme is that regional models demonstrate genuine added value over the global models that drive them. This is not merely a matter of sharper pictures. The high-resolution simulations represent temperature extremes, heavy precipitation events, coastal processes, and complex terrain with substantially greater fidelity, which matters because these are precisely the phenomena that cause the most damage to communities and infrastructure. When a regional model can resolve the sea breeze that moderates a coastal heatwave, or the orographic uplift that triggers a flash flood on a mountain slope, its projections of future extremes become far more useful to planners and emergency managers.

The CMIP6-based projections now available for Australasia show robust agreement on one central fact: substantial warming through the twenty-first century is essentially locked in across the region. The magnitude of that warming, however, depends overwhelmingly on which emissions pathway the world follows, making human choices the dominant source of uncertainty in temperature projections. Precipitation is a different story altogether. Rainfall responses vary considerably from one subregion to another, with some areas projected to become drier and others facing changes that are harder to pin down, reflecting the intricate interplay of atmospheric circulation, ocean temperatures, and local geography that governs water availability across the continent and its island neighbours.

Beyond the headline projections, the past decade and a half has seen significant methodological advances that have quietly revolutionised the field. Convection-permitting modelling, which runs regional models at kilometre-scale resolutions fine enough to simulate thunderstorms directly rather than approximating them with statistical formulas, has moved from research curiosity to operational tool. Benchmarking frameworks now allow systematic evaluation of model performance against observations, while improved bias-correction methods help translate raw model output into information that hydrologists, engineers, and farmers can actually use. Together these advances have sharpened both the physical realism of the simulations and the credibility of their evaluation.

The practical payoff of this scientific investment is now visible across nearly every sector of Australian and Pacific society. Regional climate projections underpin decision-making in water resource management, where reservoir operators need to know how inflows will shift in the decades ahead. Agricultural planners use the projections to assess how growing seasons and crop water requirements will change. Disaster risk reduction agencies, energy system planners, public health authorities, and national climate services all draw on the same coordinated datasets, meaning that a single scientific infrastructure quietly supports adaptation decisions worth billions of dollars across the region.

None of this would have been possible without sustained investment in shared computing infrastructure. The National Computational Infrastructure in Australia has provided the enormous processing power and data storage that regional climate modelling demands, and coordination has been strengthened further through the National Partnership for Climate Projections, which links state and federal programmes into a coherent whole. This model of collaboration, in which different levels of government and multiple research institutions contribute to a common international framework, has become a quiet success story in how complex scientific infrastructure can be built and maintained over decades.

Significant challenges nonetheless remain on the horizon. Regional climate modelling is computationally voracious, and the demand for ever-finer resolution continually pushes against available supercomputing capacity. Persistent model biases, particularly in simulating precipitation, continue to limit confidence in some projections. Designing ensembles that efficiently sample the range of possible futures without duplicating effort is an ongoing scientific puzzle, and perhaps the most difficult challenge of all is communicative rather than computational: translating sprawling multi-model datasets into decision-ready guidance that a council engineer or a hospital administrator can act upon without needing a doctorate in climate science.

The strategic priorities identified for the coming years point toward an ambitious future. Kilometre-scale convection-permitting modelling is expected to become the new standard, capturing storm-scale processes that current models still approximate. Enhanced coupling between regional models and Earth system components such as oceans, vegetation, and carbon cycles promises more complete simulations. Coordinated super-ensembles combining many models and scenarios, the responsible integration of artificial intelligence techniques to accelerate both simulation and analysis, stronger observational constraints to narrow uncertainty, and expanded support for vulnerable remote Australian islands and Pacific Island nations all feature prominently in the roadmap. For the low-lying atoll nations of the Pacific, whose very existence is threatened by rising seas and intensifying storms, the stakes of this work could hardly be higher.

The fifteen-year story of CORDEX-Australasia is ultimately a story about turning planetary-scale physics into locally meaningful knowledge. As the synthesis makes clear, delivering robust, high-resolution climate information for adaptation and resilience across Australasia will require sustained investment, continued collaboration, and relentless innovation. But the foundation has been laid, the datasets exist, the methods have matured, and the region now possesses a scientific capability that its founders could scarcely have imagined when the first coordinated downscaling experiments began. The task ahead is to ensure that this capability keeps pace with a changing climate and the growing urgency of the decisions it must inform.

Subject of Research: Regional climate downscaling and high-resolution climate projections for Australasia under the CORDEX programme

Article Title: Fifteen years of regional climate downscaling in CORDEX-Australasia

Article References: Evans, J. P., Thatcher, M., Argüeso, D., Di Luca, A., Trancoso, R., Andrys, J., Chapman, S., Di Virgilio, G., Dowdy, A., Fita, L., Gibson, P. B., Grose, M., Howard, E., Ji, F., Kala, J., Katzfey, J., Khadke, L., Mughal, O., Ng, B., … Ye, H. (2026). Fifteen years of regional climate downscaling in CORDEX-Australasia. PLOS Climate, 5(9), e0001066. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pclm.0001066

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pclm.0001066

Keywords: CORDEX-Australasia, regional climate modelling, climate downscaling, CMIP6, convection-permitting models, climate extremes, precipitation projections, Australasia, Pacific Islands, climate adaptation, bias correction, climate services

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

Ciguatera fish poisoning is caused by ciguatoxins, potent neurotoxins produced by benthic dinoflagellates of the genus Gambierdiscus and related organisms that grow on dead coral and macroalgae in tropical reef ecosystems. The toxins accumulate in herbivorous reef fish and pass up the food web to large predatory species that are a staple of island diets. Disturbances that create fresh surfaces for dinoflagellate colonisation, such as cyclone damage to coral or sediment and nutrient pulses from land, can therefore increase the abundance of toxigenic organisms and raise the risk of poisoning. Because there is no routine test for ciguatoxin in fish sold or caught for local consumption, island communities depend heavily on their own environmental knowledge to judge when and where fish are safe to eat.

To capture that knowledge, the researchers conducted structured interviews with 37 long-term residents of Ambae, asking them to describe changes in rainfall, tropical cyclones, land use, runoff and reef conditions over their lifetimes. The interview responses were then compared with MERRA-2 reanalysis rainfall data, the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, version 2, produced by NASA, along with tropical cyclone records for the southwest Pacific and provincial-level ciguatera case data in which Ambae cases dominate. This dual approach, pairing perceived change with measured change, is a recognised method for validating local observations and for identifying where memory, experience and instrumentation diverge.

The comparison produced a striking pattern of convergence on intensity and divergence on frequency. Residents overwhelmingly perceived that rainfall had become more intense and that cyclones had grown stronger, and these perceptions broadly matched the observed record, which shows increasing rainfall variability and rising cyclone intensity across the study period. When it came to how often cyclones strike, however, perceptions diverged from the data: community members tended to believe cyclones were becoming more frequent, while the observed records did not show a matching upward trend in frequency. The authors attribute this gap to the psychology of high-impact storms, in which memories of devastating events such as Cyclone Funa, which struck Ambae in January 2008, and Cyclone Pam in 2015, anchor perceptions of frequency around the most traumatic experiences rather than the full statistical record.

This memory effect has practical consequences. Risk perception research has repeatedly shown that experience of extreme events shapes how communities prepare, adapt and respond, and the Ambae findings reinforce the point that perceived frequency can be inflated by salient disasters even when the underlying hazard statistics remain more stable. For disaster risk managers in Vanuatu and other small island developing states, the message is that community early-warning knowledge is reliable for intensity and impact but should be complemented by objective monitoring when it comes to frequency-based planning, so that adaptation resources are allocated according to actual hazard profiles rather than recollection alone.

The second strand of the study turned to health. Using exploratory statistical analysis, the researchers examined whether annual ciguatera case counts were more closely associated with rainfall anomalies or with tropical cyclone activity. The results pointed clearly toward cyclones: years with greater cyclone activity were more strongly linked to elevated case counts than years with unusual rainfall. This is mechanistically plausible, since cyclones deliver a double disturbance, physically shattering coral structures that dinoflagellates readily colonise and dumping large pulses of terrestrial sediment, nutrients and organic material onto nearshore reefs through intensified runoff. Studies from other Pacific islands, including Rarotonga in the Cook Islands and reef systems in American Samoa and Palau, have documented similar ridge-to-reef pathways in which catchment disturbance and storm runoff degrade benthic habitat and alter the ecological conditions that favour toxigenic dinoflagellates.

The authors are careful to stress the limits of causal inference. The ciguatera case series is short, recorded only at annual resolution, and compiled at a coarse provincial scale dominated by Ambae cases, which means the analysis cannot isolate the exact timing and location of exposures or control for changes in reporting practice, health-seeking behaviour and island population movements. Ambae’s own recent history complicates the picture further: the Ambae volcano erupted in a Plinian episode during 2017 and 2018, forcing the evacuation of the entire island population and disrupting both land use and fishing patterns. Volcanic ashfall, deforestation and displacement all interact with climatic stressors in ways that a short annual case record cannot disentangle, and the researchers explicitly frame their ciguatera findings as indicative associations rather than proof of causation.

Even so, the study’s central contribution is methodological and quietly transformative. It demonstrates that community knowledge and satellite-based environmental monitoring can be systematically combined to identify plausible ridge-to-reef pathways linking climatic disturbance, land-use change, reef degradation and climate-sensitive disease risk. Earlier work by the same lead author, published in Communications Earth & Environment in 2024, showed that Indigenous knowledge in Vanuatu, combined with scientific observation, can function as an early warning system for ciguatera outbreaks. The new research strengthens that foundation by quantifying which components of community observation are most trustworthy, and by anchoring them in a 43-year environmental record that no single resident could hold in memory.

For the people of Ambae, where reef fish remain central to nutrition, livelihoods and cultural practice, the stakes of this research are immediate. Ciguatera is the most widely reported marine food-borne illness in the Pacific islands, with tens of thousands of cases recorded regionally over recent decades, and its burden falls disproportionately on communities with the least access to laboratory diagnostics. Understanding that cyclone years may seed conditions for later poisoning outbreaks gives health authorities a possible window for targeted public health messaging, and gives fishing communities a scientific echo of the traditional knowledge they already apply when deciding whether a reef is safe. As climate change continues to intensify extreme rainfall and cyclone behaviour across the southwest Pacific, integrating local observation with environmental records offers small island communities one of the few practical tools available for anticipating a hazard that hides inside an otherwise valuable food source.

The research also carries a broader message for climate adaptation science. Perception studies conducted across Africa, Asia and the Pacific have often found mismatches between what communities observe and what meteorological records show, and those mismatches are frequently used to question local knowledge. The Ambae study flips that framing, showing that local observation can be highly accurate where it matters most, for intensity and impact, and that apparent errors are themselves informative about how humans experience and remember environmental risk. In an era when monitoring infrastructure is sparse across much of the Pacific, the residents of small islands are, in effect, a distributed sensing network, and this study shows how their observations can be calibrated against, and combined with, the satellite record to protect both ecosystems and human health.

Subject of Research: Community perceptions of climate variability, land-use change and ciguatera fish poisoning risk on Ambae Island, Vanuatu, compared with observed rainfall and cyclone records

Article Title: Community perceptions and observed environmental records of climate variability, land-use change, and ciguatera fish poisoning risk on Ambae Island, Vanuatu

Article References: Rarai, A., Weber, E., Sagero, P. O., & Parsons, M. (2026). Community perceptions and observed environmental records of climate variability, land-use change, and ciguatera fish poisoning risk on Ambae Island, Vanuatu. Regional Environmental Change, 26(4), Article 193. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-026-02686-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10113-026-02686-9

Keywords: ciguatera fish poisoning, Vanuatu, Ambae Island, climate variability, tropical cyclones, rainfall, land-use change, coral reefs, community perception, MERRA-2, ridge-to-reef, Pacific Islands

Palau, an archipelago of roughly 500 islands in the western Pacific with a population of around 18,000 people, exemplifies the nutrition transition that has swept through the region. Traditional diets built around fish, taro, breadfruit, cassava, and tropical fruits have been progressively displaced by rice, canned meats, instant noodles, sugary beverages, and other shelf-stable imports. These shifts, accelerated by trade liberalization, food import dependence, and changing lifestyles, have transformed the metabolic health of island communities. Today, non-communicable diseases such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease account for the overwhelming majority of deaths in Palau, placing enormous strain on a small health system and prompting national strategies that explicitly call for revitalizing local food production.

The research team set out to fill a persistent evidence gap. While urban gardening has been studied extensively in North America, Europe, and East Asia, relatively little is known about its role in small island developing states, where the drivers of food insecurity and chronic disease differ markedly from those in large continental cities. In Palau, gardening is not simply a leisure activity or an urban planning experiment; it is entangled with cultural identity, subsistence traditions, land tenure systems, and family food provisioning. Understanding how gardens function in this context required a mixed-methods approach that combined quantitative health and dietary data with qualitative accounts of why people grow food and how harvests move through households and communities.

Methodologically, the study drew on survey data collected from residents across Palau’s urban and peri-urban areas, capturing whether households maintained gardens, what crops they cultivated, how frequently they consumed garden produce, and how this related to broader dietary patterns. Anthropometric measures, including body mass index, allowed the researchers to link gardening behavior with health indicators. Supplementary interviews and community engagement provided texture to the numbers, revealing the social and cultural mechanisms through which gardening shapes food choices. This combination is important because the relationship between gardening and health is rarely a simple matter of calories or nutrients; it operates through food environments, caregiving practices, knowledge transmission, and the cultural value assigned to traditional foods.

The results paint a nuanced picture. Households engaged in gardening tended to report greater consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables, particularly traditional crops such as taro, breadfruit, bananas, and leafy greens that are central to Palauan food heritage. Gardeners also described stronger connections to customary food practices, including the preparation of dishes that have become less common as imported staples dominate the market. These dietary associations matter because replacing refined, energy-dense imported foods with fiber-rich traditional produce is precisely the kind of dietary change that public health authorities in the Pacific recommend for reducing obesity and diabetes risk. In a country where a single can of processed meat can cost more than a meal of locally grown fish and taro, gardens also offer an economic buffer against volatile import prices and supply disruptions.

Yet the study is careful not to overclaim. The observed associations between gardening and diet do not establish that gardening causes better health outcomes, and the relationship with body mass index was more complicated than a simple protective effect. Households that garden may differ systematically from those that do not, in terms of income, land access, age structure, and health consciousness, and these confounding factors are difficult to fully disentangle in a cross-sectional design. Some gardeners reported barriers that limited the health impact of their harvests, including damage from pests and extreme weather, labor constraints, and the persistent pull of convenient imported foods, particularly among younger family members. The researchers emphasize that gardening is best understood as one component of a broader food system transformation rather than a standalone cure for the obesity crisis.

The cultural dimensions of the findings are among their most striking aspects. In Palauan society, taro patches are traditionally tended by women and carry deep customary significance, tied to clan obligations, funerary feasts, and the transfer of knowledge between generations. Breadfruit and banana cultivation likewise connect families to seasonal rhythms and communal sharing practices. The study suggests that gardens function as sites of cultural reproduction as much as food production, and that this cultural role may itself be protective. When traditional foods carry prestige and are eaten regularly, the dietary foundations of metabolic health are reinforced by identity and belonging rather than by clinical advice alone. Public health interventions that ignore this cultural infrastructure, the authors imply, risk being far less effective than those that build on it.

The implications extend well beyond Palau. Across the Pacific and in many other small island developing states, governments are searching for practical strategies to reduce dependence on food imports, which can exceed 80 percent of caloric intake in some nations, while simultaneously confronting epidemic levels of non-communicable disease. Urban and peri-urban gardening sits at the intersection of these agendas, offering co-benefits for nutrition, food sovereignty, climate resilience, and cultural continuity. The Palau findings suggest that supporting gardens, through land access guarantees, water infrastructure, pest management assistance, and school-based programs, could be a relatively low-cost policy lever with measurable dietary returns. They also caution that gardens must be paired with broader measures, including import tariffs on unhealthy foods, restrictions on sugary beverage marketing, and investment in local food value chains, if they are to shift population-level health trajectories.

Climate change adds urgency to this agenda. Rising sea levels, saltwater intrusion into taro patches, coral reef degradation affecting fisheries, and increasingly intense storms all threaten the traditional food systems that gardens sustain. Palau has already experienced events that damaged staple crops and underscored the fragility of island food supplies. In this light, the study’s emphasis on documenting and strengthening gardening practices carries a resilience dimension: every productive garden is a hedge against both the next supply chain disruption and the slow erosion of dietary heritage. The researchers argue that climate adaptation planning and nutrition policy should be developed together, with gardens as a shared focal point.

For the international research community, the study demonstrates the value of examining urban sustainability questions through the lens of small island states, which are often absent from the urban agriculture literature despite facing some of the world’s most acute food and health challenges. The Palau case shows that urban gardening in this setting is neither a novelty nor a luxury but a living practice with measurable associations to diet and deep roots in social life. As the global burden of obesity continues to climb and cities everywhere grapple with how to feed residents healthily and sustainably, the experience of this small Pacific nation offers a reminder that some of the most promising solutions may be growing, quite literally, in people’s own backyards, waiting to be recognized, supported, and scaled with the care that culture and community demand.

Subject of Research: Urban gardening and its associations with diet and health in Palau amid an obesity crisis

Article Title: Urban gardening and its associations with diet and health in Palau facing an obesity crisis

Article References: Iida, A., Tsuchiya-Theorin, C., Nwe, Y. Y., Yamazaki, T., Arsenio, N., Kitalong, C., Yokohari, M., & Furusawa, T. (2026). Urban gardening and its associations with diet and health in Palau facing an obesity crisis. npj Urban Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00472-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s42949-026-00472-4

Keywords: urban gardening, Palau, obesity, non-communicable diseases, diet, food security, Pacific Islands, nutrition transition, traditional foods, food sovereignty, public health, urban sustainability