Hopkins, Melanie Claire, (born 9 Aug. 1973), HM Diplomatic Service; High Commissioner to Fiji, (non-resident) High Commissioner to Kiribati, Tonga and Tuvalu, (non-resident) Ambassador to the Republic of the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia, and Head, South Pacific Network, since 2016

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (9) ◽  
pp. 1293-1296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kanae Moriya ◽  

This study aims to find out the basis of Marshallese students’ aspirations to migrate abroad, determine whether intellectuals in the same country share such aspirations, observe how well Japanese university students and intellectuals understand why Marshallese students migrate, and compare the Marshallese students’ motivations to emigrate with those of students from the Federated States of Micronesia. I conducted a survey by interview and questionnaire in the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Japan. I found that 65% of the students in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) felt education was the primary reason to migrate abroad, followed by work (15%), health (8%), family (7%), climate change (3%), and natural disasters (2%). The RMI intellectuals correctly guessed the relative importance students granted the factors (education, work, health, etc.). However, they underestimated the importance of education for the students. Eleven percent of the Japanese students assumed that Marshallese students would wish to migrate abroad because of climate change, which overestimates the students’ feelings about the issue. Interestingly, no Japanese student considered health or family to be possible reasons for RMI students to emigrate abroad. Perhaps, Japanese students were not aware of the prevalence of very strong family ties and inadequate medical facilities in RMI. There were similar percentages of students who wished to migrate because of climate change between the RMI (3%) and the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) (4%). However, the RMI is an atoll country that may be submerged by climate change, and the FSM is mostly composed of volcanic islands that will not be submerged.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 117863292110208
Author(s):  
Subhashni Taylor

Anthropogenic climate change and related sea level rise will have a range of impacts on populations, particularly in the low lying Pacific island countries (PICs). One of these impacts will be on the health and well-being of people in these nations. In such cases, access to medical facilities is important. This research looks at the medical facilities currently located on 14 PICs and how climate change related impacts such as sea level rise may affect these facilities. The medical infrastructure in each country were located using information from a range of sources such as Ministry of Health (MoH) websites, World Health Organization, Doctors Assisting in South Pacific Islands (DAISI), Commonwealth Health Online, and Google Maps. A spatial analysis was undertaken to identify medical infrastructure located within 4 zones from the coastline of each country: 0 to 50 m, 50 to 100 m, 100 to 200 m, and 200 to 500 m. The findings indicate that 62% of all assessed medical facilities in the 14 PICs are located within 500 m of the coast. The low-lying coral atoll countries of Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Tokelau, and Tuvalu will be highly affected as all medical facilities in these countries fall within 500 m of the coast. The results provide a baseline analysis of the threats posed by sea-level rise to existing critical medical infrastructure in the 14 PICs and could be useful for adaptive planning. These countries have limited financial and technical resources which will make adaptation challenging.


Field Methods ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 395-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Robbins ◽  
Justin M. Nolan ◽  
Diana Chen

A new free-list measure of cognitive salience, B′, is presented, which includes both list position and list frequency. It surpasses other extant measures by being normed to vary between a maximum of 1 and a minimum of 0, thereby making it useful for comparisons irrespective of list length or number of respondents. An illustration of its properties, uses, and computation is provided with the aid of examples drawn from free lists of foods elicited from a sample of migrants from the Republic of the Marshall Islands.


Author(s):  
Peter Rudiak-Gould

The Republic of the Marshall Islands, an archipelago of low-lying coral atolls in eastern Micronesia, is one of four sovereign nations that may be rendered uninhabitable by climate change in the present century. It is not merely sea level rise which is expected to undermine life in these islands, but the synergy of multiple climatic threats (Barnett and Adger 2003). Rising oceans and increasingly frequent typhoons will exacerbate flooding at the same time that the islands’ natural protection—coral reefs—will die from warming waters and ocean acidification. Fresh water resources will be threatened by both droughts and salt contamination from flooding. Although the reaction of the coral atoll environment to climate change is uncertain, it is likely that the islands will no longer be able to support human habitation within fifty or a hundred years (Barnett and Adger 2003: 326)—quite possibly within the lifetimes of many Marshall Islanders living today. In the public imagination, climate change in vulnerable, remote locations is the intrusion of contamination into a formerly pristine environment, of danger into a once secure sanctuary, of change into a once static microcosm (see Lynas 2004: 81, 124). Archaeologists, of course, know better than this: every place has a history of environmental upheavals, and the Marshall Islands is no exception. Researchers agree that coral atolls are among the most precarious and marginal environments that humans have managed to inhabit (Weisler 1999; Yamaguchi et al. 2005: 27), existing only ‘on the margins of sustainability’ (Weisler 2001). The islands in fact only recently formed: while the reefs are tens of millions of years old, the islets that sit on them emerged from the sea only recently, probably around 2000 BP (Weisler et al. 2000: 194; Yamaguchi et al. 2005: 31–2), just before the first people arrived (Yamaguchi et al. 2005: 31–2). The new home that these early seafarers found was not so much an ancient safe haven as a fragile geological experiment—land whose very existence was tenuous long before humans were altering the global climate.


2020 ◽  
pp. 104420732093254
Author(s):  
Dawn A. Rowe ◽  
Catherine H. Fowler ◽  
Cesar D’Agord ◽  
Frank Horiuchi ◽  
Miles Kawatachi ◽  
...  

In the wake of reports of continued gaps between youth with and without disabilities in regard to graduation rates and postschool outcomes, the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE), Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) began examining their process for monitoring state implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEA). OSEP’s revised accountability system, known as Results-Driven Accountability, better aligns accountability systems to support states in improving results for infants, toddlers, and youth with disabilities and their families. Currently required from states, is a comprehensive multiyear State Systemic Improvement Plan (SSIP) focused on improving results for students with disabilities. The purpose of this article is to describe the phases of the SSIP and provide an example of how this new accountability system is working in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). As with all other states, territories, and freely associated states, RMI is required to develop and implement an SSIP.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document