Gullah Geechee people set out to keep their family land
| | LONDON, UK, 10 May 2026 (Guardian) - On Arthur Champen’s half-acre property in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, a thicket of southern live oaks, palmettos and pine trees muffle the roar of cars on nearby highway 278. His haint blue house, lightened by the sun, sits on stilts to protect it from flooding that comes with the high tide. About a decade ago, Champen’s family nearly lost the grassy marshland next door that their family bought several generations ago. |
Cape Verde bets on tech to reverse postcolonial brain drain
| | PRAIA, Cape Verde, 10 May 2026 (Guardian) - Now, almost 150 years since slavery was abolished in Cape Verde, and just over 50 years since independence from Portugal, Pedro Fernandes Lopes wants the country to become a beacon for the free movement of human and financial capital across the African diaspora. Lopes is Cape Verde’s secretary of state for the digital economy and an important figure in its drive to become a digital hub for west Africa and beyond, modelled in part on Estonia’s much-vaunted digitisation programme. |
Army parachutes onto remote island to help Briton
| | LONDON, UK, 10 May 2026 (BBC) - British Army medics have parachuted onto the remote Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha to help a British national with suspected hantavirus. The man left MV Hondius, the cruise ship hit by a deadly outbreak of the virus, in mid-April at Britain's most remote inhabited overseas territory, where he lives. Oxygen was also dropped from an RAF A400M on Saturday, with supplies at a "critical level" on the island, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) said. |
Technology is making the Pacific's drug highway harder to detect
| | SYDNEY, Australia, 8 May 2026 (Interpreter) - In the global narcotics trade, transnational criminal networks are consolidating their hold on the Pacific drug highway. Technology is enabling these networks to adapt and refine tactics to evade detection in the region, resulting in a trafficking system that is distributed and resilient. The approach is less about the protection of individual shipments than ensuring the redundancy of the system as a whole. The repeated discovery of “narco-subs" in Pacific waters is an example of this evolution. |
Cruise ship hantavirus outbreak reveals an unexpected solution
| | GLAND, Switzerland, 8 May 2026 (IUCN) - A deadly hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius has renewed global attention on how rodent-borne diseases spread. The outbreak, linked to the Andes strain of hantavirus, has resulted in multiple deaths and triggered international contact tracing efforts after passengers travelled across several countries. But while the immediate focus is on containment aboard the ship, scientists say the bigger story may begin on land, revealing how environmental disruption may increase disease risk. |
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IWRA |
 | | 1st Islands Water Congress 4-6 Sept, 2024, Torshavn, Faroe Islands |
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ANATOMY OF ISLANDS |
| | 12th Anatomy of Islands symposium 26-28 Sept, 2024, Jelsa, Hvar Island, Croatia |
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CIS |
| | Critical Island Studies 4th international conference 3-4 Oct, 2024, Manila, Philippines |
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CBD |
| | COP16 21 Oct-1 Nov, 2024, Cali, Colombia |
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UNFCCC |
| | COP29 11-22 November, 2024, Baku, Azerbaijan |
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ISLAND DYNAMICS |
| | DARKNESS II conference, 20-23 January 2025, Nuuk, Greenland |
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JICAS |
| | Islands And Island Studies conference 3-7 June, 2025, Jersey, Channel Islands |
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UNITED NATIONS |
| | UN Ocean Conference 9-13 June, 2025, Nice, France |
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UPEI |
| | 3rd international conference on SIS and SNIJs 16-20 June, 2025, Charlottetown, PEI |
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GSIS |
| | Global Sustainable Islands Summit 20-22 April, 2026, Gran Canaria, Spain |
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SICRI |
| | Island Studies International Conference 25-28 June, 2026, Tacloban City, Leyte Islands, Philippines |
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ISISA |
| | 20th Islands of the World Conference 7-11 July 2026, Shinan County, Jeollanam-do, South Korea |
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SPREP |
| | 11th Pacific Islands Conference for Nature Conservation and Protected Areas, 7–11 September 2026, Noumea, New Caledonia |
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