2025 Island Health & Sustainability Conference Proceedings
Affiliations
  1. Gump South Pacific Research Station
  2. University of California, Berkeley
  3. Institut Louis Malardé
  4. University of French Polynesia
  5. Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
  6. Centre de Recherches Insulaires et Observatoire de l'Environnement
  7. Rahui Center
  8. Ifremer
  9. Institut de Recherche pour le Développement
  10. Metadata Game Changers (United States)

Abstract

The 2nd Island Health & Sustainability Conference (IHS 2025), held in Moʻorea, French Polynesia, marks a strategic transition from the "foresight" of candidate missions to the "deep insight" of a formalized institutional architecture. Convened under the RESIPOL consortium, which includes six founding research institutions, the proceedings outline a roadmap for achieving island-scale sustainability through four core missions: Public Health (mosquito-borne disease elimination), Island Food Systems, Marine Energy & Blue Bioeconomy, and Land-Sea Resilience. While Public Health serves as the established proof-of-concept, the other missions have matured to include concrete 2030 targets, such as doubling organic agriculture and deploying a seaweed biorefinery capable of addressing approximately half of the territory's carbon footprint. A distinctive contribution of the 2025 conference is the operationalization of "Communities of Inquiry," which utilize social and technological infrastructures—including Indigenous metadata standards and the iPlaces platform—to ensure data sovereignty and democratic decision-making. By treating Sites Ateliers (such as Tetiaroa, Moʻorea, and the EEZ) as the connective tissue of the program, the proceedings demonstrate how place-based research is being translated into biocultural stewardship and measurable territorial policy. These proceedings provide the scientific and ethical framework necessary to measure success against the missions' 2030 horizons while navigating cross-cutting challenges like the "Turbinaria tangle" and the strategic use of regulatory autonomy.

Island Health & Sustainability Research Conference 2025: From foresight to (deep) insight

Executive Summary

The 2nd Island Health & Sustainability Conference (IHS 2025) convened 18–20 November 2025 at the UC Berkeley Gump South Pacific Research Station in Moʻorea, French Polynesia, with satellite workshops bracketing the main programme on the 17th and 21st. Where 2024 launched the IH&S series and sketched a set of candidate missions, 2025 convened under an institutional umbrella that did not exist a year earlier — RESIPOL, French Polynesia's Research, Higher Education and Innovation Consortium, with its six founding members (UPF, ILM, IFREMER, IRD, CNRS, and UC Berkeley) all represented on the Programme Committee. Sponsored by the Island Sustainability Research Fund at UC Berkeley with convening-level support from the Social Capital Foundation, and delivered in partnership with the members of RESIPOL, Tetiaroa Society, Te Pū ʻAtitiʻa and the contributors listed on the agenda, the conference brought approximately fifty participants together across three days organised around three themes: Day 1 — Missions to Markets, Day 2 — Communities of Inquiry, and Day 3 — Sites Ateliers.

Four strategic missions structured the work. Public health, anchored by mosquito-borne disease elimination (Mozeroa) and established as the founding mission at the inaugural 2024 meeting, now functions as the proof-of-concept the other three missions are working toward: a measurable, time-bound, place-based programme with active pilot sites (Tetiaroa, Paea, and from 2026 the Cook Islands under the WHO-sponsored PacSIT trials), an industrial production facility at Tinia, and a regulatory pathway under formal evaluation. The food systems, marine energy and blue bioeconomy, and land-sea resilience missions matured into the IH&S frame in the year between, with food systems now proposing concrete five-year targets (doubling organic agriculture, 100% sustainable fishing on Moʻorea and Tahiti, 50% reductions in pesticide and imported-fertiliser use), marine energy carrying the most quantitatively developed pathway (a seaweed biorefinery on ~0.008% of the EEZ addressing roughly half the territory's carbon footprint), and land-sea resilience having named the absence of measurable targets as the problem itself.

Communities of inquiry — the social and technological infrastructures needed to make mission-driven research tractable for democratic island-scale decision-making — emerged as the conference's distinctive contribution beyond the 2024 frame. Across the three days, data sovereignty moved from an ethical principle to an operational precondition for evidence: Indigenous metadata standards, the Te Mauri Ora and Te Ora Fenua Ethnocode-and Biocode projects, and the iPlaces platform (scheduled for deployment at Gump and Tetiaroa in early 2026) advanced together as the components of a single operational stack. The sites ateliers — Tetiaroa, Moʻorea, Tahiti, the EEZ, Palmyra, Moku o Loʻe, Rapa Nui, and the deep ocean — functioned as the connective tissue of the programme rather than as case studies attached to thematic sessions.

Forward commitments for 2026 are concrete: the CASUP-2.0 plan publishing 26 April 2026; the Honu deep-ocean platform's first programmatic research committee meeting in January 2026; the proposed Moʻorea Ocean Environmental Leadership Program endorsed from the floor; and the Mozeroa 2030 Huahine workstream advancing alongside the Paea community-scale deployment. Cross-cutting work for the consortium centres on four threads: settling the Turbinaria tangle (a coordination problem masquerading as a taxonomic one across three missions), reconciling regulatory autonomy as both chokepoint and strategic asset, building data-sovereignty infrastructure in parallel with mission deployments rather than retrofitting it afterward, and closing the measurable-target gap on terms the missions themselves accept. Closing the meeting, conference chair Neil Davies described the arc as a movement from foresight to insight to deep insight — the foresight of 2024's candidate missions, the insight of 2025's institutional architecture, and the deep insight that the 2026 work will be measured against.

Introduction and Conference Overview

The 2nd Island Health & Sustainability Conference (IHS 2025) was held in person at the UC Berkeley Gump South Pacific Research Station in Moʻorea, French Polynesia, from 18–20 November 2025, with satellite workshops bracketing the main programme on the 17th and 21st. Where 2024 launched the conference as a new annual gathering and sketched a set of candidate missions, 2025 convened under the institutional umbrella secured in the interim — RESIPOL, French Polynesia's Research, Higher Education and Innovation Consortium — with its six founding members (UPF, ILM, IFREMER, IRD, CNRS, and UC Berkeley) all represented on the Programme Committee. 

The conference was sponsored by the Island Sustainability Research Fund at UC Berkeley. Convening-level support for cross-institution participation was provided by the Social Capital Foundation, whose continued partnership across both years of the IH&S series has anchored the convening as a recurring annual gathering rather than a one-off event. Partner organisations contributing to the programme included RESIPOL, the Tetiaroa Society, Te Pū ‘Atiti’a, and the institutions involved in the place-based use cases on the agenda. Approximately fifty participants attended the main conference in person or remotely, drawn from a deliberately broad cross-section of disciplines and geographies. A full participant list is provided in Appendix 1.

Building on the inaugural 2024 conference, the 2025 agenda was shaped by four strategic missions: food systems transformation, marine energy and the blue bioeconomy, land-sea resilience, and public health. Public health, anchored by mosquito-borne disease elimination, was the founding mission established at the inaugural 2024 meeting; food systems, marine energy, and the blue bioeconomy, and land-sea resilience matured into the IH&S frame in the year between, and the conference provided momentum for a suite of activities in 2026. Each mission was anchored by translational research domains that recurred across the programme: seaweed as a candidate feedstock for a circular bioeconomy spanning food, energy, and materials; the mosquito as a tractable target for an island-scale public-health mission; and the carbon cycle as both a component of land-sea resilience and a potential financing mechanism through blue carbon and sustainable-tourism credits.

A distinctive emphasis of the 2025 conference was the concept of communities of inquiry — the social and technological infrastructures needed for learning to make mission-driven research tractable for democratic island-scale decision-making. This framing extended the 2024 report's cross-cutting theme of community decision-support into a more explicit programme of work on governance models (biocultural stewardship, social licence to operate, co-management with customary authorities), ethics and technology in scholarly publication (research compliance, place-based data trusts such as iPlaces, AI-assisted curriculum translation), and rights frameworks that extend personhood and representation beyond the human — captured in the conference's recurring shorthand, "More Than Humans." The intent was to ensure that the technical capacities being built around the four missions are matched by governance and data infrastructures that keep evidence under community control.

Running through all three days and constituting the explicit focus of Day 3 were the conference's sites ateliers — place-based use cases of differing social-ecological scales at which the four missions can be tested, refined, and operationalised. These ranged from Tetiaroa, the focal site for the Tetiaroa Society's Conservation and Sustainable Use Plan (CASUP) entering its second decade, to Moʻorea, with its commune-level Marine Management Plan, to Tahiti, exemplified by the Tereheamanu confederation of communes, to French Polynesia's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ), the world's largest marine protected area, and outward to the 4Site Pacific Transect Collaborative, a translocal network linking Pacific field stations into a shared knowledge infrastructure. Treating these sites as the connective tissue of the conference — rather than as case studies bolted onto thematic talks — was a deliberate organisational choice, intended to anchor mission-driven ambitions in the actual islands, communes, station networks, and ocean where they will succeed or fail.

A note on methodology. This report draws on conference transcripts, slide decks, the conference programme, and contemporaneous meeting notes. Drafting and synthesis were supported by Claude (Anthropic, claude.ai), an AI assistant, under the direction of the author. Speaker attributions were verified against slide decks and the conference programme rather than transcript labels, which were not reliable for this conference. All factual claims, editorial choices, and the final text are the author's responsibility.

Contributed Talks and Abstracts

In this section, we provide a detailed day-by-day summary of the presentations. This only scratches the surface of the rich detail in each presenter’s contribution. For more detailed summaries of each talk, please see the associated conference proceedings website. Each presentation below is published as a citable record with its own DOI.

Island Bioeconomies: From Missions to Markets [Day 1]—18 November 2025:

Day 1 first oriented attendees to the significance of the place they were meeting. The conference opened with a traditional welcome from Te Pū ʻAtitiʻa, the Moʻorea-based association whose work in cultural and linguistic stewardship has anchored the Gump Station's relationships with the island for decades, before Neil Davies opened the meeting on behalf of the organising consortium. Davies framed the conference under the auspices of RESIPOL and offered the day’s opening framing through a single opposition: the very local — the organic, grounded, place-based identity of being part of this island, this lagoon, this culture — and the planetary — the recognition that we are all connected through what Davies called "the two great global commons," the one ocean and the one atmosphere. He handed off to the day's opening keynote with a question that would frame the entire programme: how do we govern in this era of planetary challenges while hopefully retaining, or moving more sovereignty to, the local level?

Keynote 1: Island Earth: Governing in the Planetary Age

Day 1's first keynote opened with Nils Gilman (Berggruen Institute), who argued that the institutions of the global age — the UN system, the Westphalian state, the human-exceptionalist 1640s ideas that produced both — are not, in his view, the institutions a planetary age requires. Instead, he argued that what is needed is networked, multi-scale, multi-species governance. He defined this as planetary subsidiarity (delegating down for adaptation, up for mitigation), networked subnational multilateralism, and institutions capable of multi-species, rather than merely human, flourishing. 

Session 1: FP Health & Sustainability Research (RESIPOL)

Chaired by Neil Davies (Gump Station), the morning's opening session outlined current island health and sustainability research across the RESIPOL Partners. Four threads run through these six talks. Science and society are framed as partners in deciding the research questions, not just reporting after the answers are known. Multiple ways of knowing are held together rather than ranked. Open research questions are named honestly: whether oysters qualify as marine CDR, what reference state restoration should target, how to scale mosquito elimination from atoll to high island, and how to bring scientific and cultural knowledge together in meaningful ways. These talks showed how the four IH&S missions are already in working alignment and laid the foundation for the rest of the conference.

Session 2: Introduction to IH&S Missions

The "Introduction to IH&S Missions" session, chaired by Thierry Lison de Loma (Vaihuti Fresh), formally introduced the four working missions: health, land-sea resilience, food, and energy. The four missions ended the session with their objectives, partnerships, and operational architectures laid out in parallel — Health most institutionally mature with active commercial spin-out; Resilience newly resourced with COCOPOL and the ZAFP backbone; Food aligned with explicit territorial policy targets; Energy with the most ambitious quantified case but the most cultivation-and-supply-chain infrastructure still to be built — each with cross-mission dependencies that the afternoon's breakouts were designed to surface.

Keynote 2: International Bioeconomy & Macroalgae Center

The midday keynote, "Scaling the Seaweed Future: The IBMC Vision and Insights for French Polynesia," was delivered by John Coates (UC Berkeley), Director of the Energy and Biosciences Institute (EBI), with Thiago Correa as co-author. Coates picked up directly from Correa's energy-mission talk to ask where the biomass for FP's seaweed biofuels would come from. He traced EBI's intellectual path from first-generation corn-ethanol biofuels (defeated by the food-versus-energy dilemma) through second-generation lignocellulosic feedstocks (defeated by the lignin barrier) to seaweed as the only third-generation feedstock that does not compete with food, fresh water, or fertiliser. From this came the International Bioeconomy & Macroalgae Center (IBMC), founded in October 2024, headquartered at UC Berkeley, with eleven country members, fifteen institutions, and five field stations including Moʻorea, Bamfield, Lombok, and SAMS. Globally, seaweed is a ~36-million-wet-ton, $12–17 billion market, 97% of it farmed and over 95% destined for food, dominated by Asia — and Indonesia stands as the model jurisdiction, with 12 million hectares of permitted cultivation area (only 1.6% in current use) and 24-hour seaweed-farming permits at any scale, against the seven-year permitting timeline that defeats research-scale work in California. For French Polynesia, Coates put the addressable opportunity at ~$370 million per year (biofuel ethanol replacing imported gasoline and diesel, biostimulants displacing 50% of synthetic fertiliser, carbon offsets) and ~56% of the territory's carbon footprint addressable through fuel substitution, fertiliser displacement, and soil-carbon gains, on cultivated areas amounting to ~0.008% of the EEZ. In Q&A, Hannah Stewart (Coral Gardeners) raised the Turbinaria-on-coral problem; Coates pivoted to a shrimp-farm IMTA architecture in which ~36 hectares of Gracilaria combined with shrimp could displace 10% of fossil-fuel use, taking cultivation off the open reef entirely.

Keynote 3: Blue Natural Capital

Following lunch, Mere Takoko (Pacific Whale Fund) delivered "Blue Natural Capital" as a three-strand argument for an Indigenous-led, multi-dimensional climate-finance architecture against the carbon-only valuation model that dominates voluntary carbon markets. The first strand was Natural Law and the Rights of Nature, where New Zealand has pioneered legal personhood for rivers and forests; her organisation has championed a Pacific declaration of Indigenous ocean sovereignty grounded in eight Indigenous philosophies, signed by traditional leaders across Polynesia. The second was marine protection scaling on the high seas, from a 2 million km² target to 20 million km², with French Polynesia leading on roughly 4.8 million km². The third — and the heart of the keynote — was the diagnostic that carbon-only valuation systematically values out Pacific island nations and other small island developing states: ecosystems with naturally lower carbon density cannot compete on the only metric the market recognises, and co-benefits (biodiversity, cultural value, fisheries, coastal protection) go unpriced. Working with Dr. Ralph Chami and Dr. Carlos Duarte, Takoko's organisation has developed a high-integrity nature-markets standard in which mauri — life force — replaces money as the unit of indicator, explicitly distinct from Verra and the Gold Standard.

Session 3: Te Ara Moana — Blue Pathways to Sustainability

Chaired by Larry Tchiou (Moorea Innovation Hub), the "Te Ara Moana: Blue Pathways to Sustainability" session, chaired by Larry Tchiou, ran from analytical methods through commercial venture-development, agroecology, and reef-restoration economics to territorial value-capture.

Keynote 4: Blue Carbon Market Standards

Communities of Inquiry [Day 2] — 19 November 2025

If Day 1 had named the missions and asked whether they could be financed, Day 2 asked a harder question: what kind of communities of inquiry do the missions actually need to work? The day's answer assembled itself in three layers. The morning began with theory: a working architecture for how bioeconomies are built, and a candid reckoning with what's missing to build one here. It moved through governance — four reframings of how Indigenous authority and scientific institutions can be designed together rather than retrofitted to each other. It closed the morning with the digital infrastructure that would deliver on those reframings. A keynote from a place-based partnership of twenty-three years then provided the human evidence that the morning had been theorising about. The afternoon translated the morning's frameworks into educational pipelines from primary school through mid-career leadership, and the day closed with a funder's discipline for measuring whether any of it would amount to change.

Keynote 5: Bioeconomy, Innovation, & Environmental Leadership

Day 2 began with David Zilberman (UC Berkeley) drawing the architecture: bioeconomies are built one supply chain at a time, regulation is the dominant chokepoint, and innovation comes in four kinds — university pipeline, recombinant fusion, capitalist incrementalism, and policy bureaucracy. He pivoted to the blue bioeconomy itself, and said, it is held back by two binding constraints: the lack of cheap technology for processing wet seaweed at scale, and the absence of established markets to sell finished products into. He also argued that UC Berkeley does not yet have enough ocean-focused faculty to lead the programme it has begun to articulate. His proposal — the Moʻorea Ocean ELP — treats leadership development as bioeconomy infrastructure: training the people who will write the regulations, build the markets, and shepherd the technology from inside their own jurisdictions.

Session 4: Governance & Stewardship

Chaired by Tamatoa Bambridge (CNRS-CRIOBE), the Governance & Stewardship session highlighted biocultural restoration as an integrated model that positions humanity as a source of environmental abundance within social-ecological systems rather than an inherent threat . A foundational theme was the necessity of securing a Social License to Operate, which requires organizations to proactively build legitimacy and community trust to ensure the successful implementation of new bioeconomy projects . The session further explored a major paradigm shift toward Indigenous data sovereignty and legal frameworks that recognize the personhood and rights of "more-than-human" entities, including the pursuit of authorship status for relatives like whales and coral reefs

Session 5: Informing Decision-makers — Ethics & Technology in Scholarly Publication

Chaired by Neil Davies (Gump Station), the morning's third session showed how digital infrastructure could underpin these projects. Each of the four talks was built around the same design principle: the infrastructure must respect local systems, local language, and local authority rather than impose a central one. 

Keynote 6: Atitia Center — 20 Years of Culture & Education

Hinano Murphy's Atiti’a keynote recounted the twenty-three years of partnership between the Gump Station and Te Pū ʻAtiti'a. She described the slow trust-building process — five years before scientists and elders could work together — and the growth that followed: 186 children engaged at the centre in 2014, growing to 2,035 in 2024. Murphy told a story from the early days of the Center, when the team was building a pandanus roof for the fare pote: the elders watched them lay the leaves upside down, watched the leaves slide off, watched them try to nail the leaves down, and only then said come down, sit, look, think. From the story Murphy drew the principle that has guided the Atitia Center since: permission to make mistakes, and the obligation to think them through. It is the operational form of te ʻite i ora — knowledge that is not knowledge until it has been lived.

Session 6: Education/Training — Curriculum Research & Development

Chaired by Maheata White Davies (Gump Station), the session on Education/Training - Curriculum Research & Development traced educational pipelines from primary classroom to mid-career leadership across four interventions.

Keynote 7: Impact Framework

Lolo Kleykamp closed the formal Day 2 content programme by giving the missions a shared discipline. As a member of the Social Capital Foundation team, Kleykamp was positioned to teach the room how the funder thinks rather than to pitch or to evaluate. She introduced the Theory of Change framework, which the Foundation embeds in every stage of its grant lifecycle, with impact written into the grant agreement as a legal requirement. The methodological core was a single counter-intuitive rule: although a Theory of Change reads naturally left to right — inputs, activities, outputs, outcomes, impact — it must be built right to left. Starting from the problem produces an endless space of possible activities; starting from the goal narrows the design space productively. The most subtle distinction, she acknowledged, is between outputs and outcomes. You can promise outputs (five workshops); you cannot promise outcomes (skills increased) — and outcomes are what actually matter for change. She offered a Dutch water-filter example as an illustration of a recurring theme from the morning session: a group of Dutch innovators distributed water filters in rural Kenya without first understanding the local distribution structures. Without this context, the project damaged the very distribution structures it relied on. Context is a precondition for input. With this tool, the unconference rooms then opened, and the missions took the day's argument into their own working sessions.

Sites Ateliers [Day 3] — 20 November 2025

Building on Day 1 and Day 2, Day 3 turned the conference toward specific places — Tetiaroa, Palmyra, Moʻorea, Tahiti, Heʻeia and Moku o Loʻe, Rapa Nui, the deep ocean — and asked, of each, what a working second decade of place-based conservation actually looks like.

Keynote: Tetiaroa Conservation & Sustainable Use Plan

The morning opened with Stan Rowland (Tetiaroa Society Co-Chair) and Frank Murphy (the Society's outgoing Executive Director) delivering the 10-year audit of the Conservation and Sustainable Use Plan (CASUP), the privately-stewarded atoll-wide governance instrument the Brando estate, Pacific Beachcomber and Tetiaroa Society had voluntarily created in 2014. Rowland framed CASUP as a deliberate experiment in non-state conservation governance, structurally distinctive on five points: created voluntarily without regulatory obligation, with stewardship delegated to a non-profit rather than retained by the owner, relying on expert input across botany, archaeology, education and culture, sought as a united vision binding owner, operator, scientists, educators and community, and explicitly intended as a model others could replicate. 

Murphy's section-by-section audit was comprehensive: research, the built environment and education had largely hit their goals; flora restoration and bird recovery were on credible trajectories — one Pterodroma pair recolonising a rat-free motu and producing four chicks over four years — supported by the Tetiaroa Atoll Restoration Program (TARP); fisheries co-governance with the Polynesian state and the Commune de Arue had been slowed by political turnover. The audit set the operating question for the rest of the day: what carries forward, what gets integrated, and what gaps must the next decade fill?

Session 7: Place-based Policy & Management — 4Site Network

The 4Site Network session, chaired by Jayna DeVore (CRIOBE/IRD), placed four Pacific sites alongside one another as a comparative case study in how place-based science is being translated into governance. The session's collective contribution was to demonstrate, through the parallel framings of CASUP 2.0, Palmyra, Tereheamanu and Moku o Loʻe, that the four sites are already running comparable governance experiments along shared gradients; the unresolved question, as Mawyer's pitch made explicit, is whether the connective infrastructure to treat them as a single region of inquiry — rather than four parallel ones — will be funded.

Keynote 8: Honu Submarine International Sea Station Tahiti

After the morning coffee break, Richard Bailey (Pacific Beachcomber Group; Tetiaroa Society) presented Honu, a new class of three-person submersibles being built in Alameda with Sylvia Earle's DOER, led by her daughter Liz Taylor. Two paired transparent-acrylic-sphere subs to 1,200 metres, with articulated arms, advanced hydrophones and a silent mode that disables internal electronics so the sub can simply listen, target the mesopelagic — 200–1,000 metres, roughly 20% of ocean volume but containing 70% of marine biomass, evolved over hundreds of millions of years without photosynthesis. Bailey's economic argument was the keynote's spine: at €5,000–€8,000 per 3-to-5-hour piloted dive — against $200–400k and a two-to-three-year wait for Alvin — Honu reframes deep-ocean access from a centrally rationed enterprise into a regionally hosted platform priced within reach of standard scientific budgets. Built around the Brando–Tetiaroa Society symbiosis in which guests subsidise science whose results enrich the next guest's visit, with a January 2026 advisory committee chaired by Frank Murphy and including Thiago Correa, Neil Davies and Liz Taylor, Honu is intended for replication at Mission Blue Hope Spots worldwide — and for deployment ahead of the threats Bailey named: The Metals Company's polymetallic-nodule mining, and Norwegian-style mesopelagic crawlers being designed to feed salmon farms once the surface fishery is exhausted, all before any baseline of what is actually down there exists.

Session 8: Blue Bioeconomies at Ocean Scales

The closing session, Blue Bioeconomies at Ocean Scales, chaired by Tamatoa Bambridge (CNRS-CRIOBE), took the day's place-based work to global scale. The session's collective contribution was to give the conference's plural-sovereignty work numerical teeth, institutional grounding, and a cosmological frame; its challenge, named most directly by Hattori, is that the convening functions the consortium now relies on may need redistributed funding from non-U.S. partners and the foundation sector if U.S. federal withdrawal continues.

Side Events on Monday and Friday

A Schools Engagement Convened by the Inspectorate (Pre-Conference, Gump Station) 

Ahead of the conference, a dedicated education-sector morning was convened at the Gump South Pacific Research Station and Atitia Centre at the proposal of M. Moana Greig, Inspecteur de l'Éducation Nationale (IEN). The half-day programme, running from 07:30 to 13:00 on Monday, 17 November 2025. It was structured to bring teaching staff and inspectorate colleagues into direct contact with the partnership between the Gump Station and Te Pū ʻAtiti'a. Neil Davies opened proceedings with an introduction to the Gump Station, followed by Terava and Hinano Murphy presenting the Atitia Centre and the Te Pū ʻAtiti'a Association. Two outreach projects presented: Brad Balukjian introduced the Manumanu project, focused on plant bugs. Adrienne Correa shared the approach Te Ora Fenua took to the science and education outreach related to rori. Jane Anderson presented on traditional knowledge and IP, to consider how educational materials should be protected. Fred Torrente provided the cultural framing of the Te Mauri Ora project. The morning closed with lunchtime discussions, underscoring the role of the Atitia Centre as a working bridge between Polynesian schools and the international research community gathered at Gump.

The convening took days after the passing of Papa Opeta, a valued community Elder and tupuna who had served Te Pū ʻAtiti'a for many years, teaching the Centre's children traditional fishing and planting practices. The conference organisers extend their condolences to his family and to the Atitia community.

Mozeroa Huahine — 2nd Annual Project Meeting (Post-Conference Satellite, ILM Paea, 21 November 2025)

Immediately following IH&S 2025, the Mozeroa team reconvened on Friday 21 November at the ILM mosquito facility in Paea, Tahiti, for the 2nd Mozeroa Huahine annual meeting, hosted by Hervé Bossin (ILM). The session brought project partners together and introduced Alida Kropf, the project's incoming Project Manager, who will be on-island for the week to open further bilateral discussions. The meeting reviewed Mozeroa's progress to date and set the workplan for 2026, framed against a substantive scientific update: the recently published xenomonitoring study of lymphatic filariasis on Huahine (Lannuzel et al., PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, 2025), which used molecular xenomonitoring to detect potential transmission foci on the island and provides essential epidemiological context for the project's intervention design. Building on these results, the team identified the field measurements still required to characterise the parameters governing the presence and abundance of the principal vector species in the Society Islands — Aedes polynesiensis, Aedes aegypti and Culex quinquefasciatus. The agreed field strategy is to conduct entomological collections across Huahine's full habitat range and, where ecological gradients can be mapped (urban → rural → coconut grove → marshy areas with tupa burrows → hill and forest), to deploy mosquito trap transects across those gradients in order to document species turnover — for example, the transition from Ae. aegypti dominance in urban centres such as Fare to Ae. polynesiensis dominance as the landscape shifts towards less human-modified habitats. The meeting closed with a shared commitment to align 2026 sampling, modelling and community-engagement workstreams around this transect-based design, ensuring the project's roadmap toward island-scale vector elimination by 2030 remains evidence-led and ecologically grounded.

Side Event — "Le carbone bleu : enjeux et perspectives" (CESEC × CRIOBE Plenary, Tahiti, 21 November 2025) Facebook post from CESEC | Tamatoa Bambridge Interview

In a striking demonstration of how the IH&S 2025 conversations carried beyond the Gump Station and into French Polynesia's institutional dialogue, the Conseil Économique, Social, Environnemental et Culturel (CESEC) convened a special plenary session — "Le carbone bleu : enjeux et perspectives" — on Friday 21 November 2025 in Papeete, organised jointly with CRIOBE. The session brought a closely aligned cohort of IH&S speakers directly before CESEC councillors and a wider Polynesian audience, providing the Fenua with a sustained scientific, environmental and economic briefing on blue carbon. The panel was composed of Dr Tamatoa Bambridge (Director of Research, CNRS-CRIOBE); Dr Mere Takoko (President of the Pacific Whale Fund and Vice-President of Conservation International); Hetereki Huke (Director of the Tepuku Research Centre and Secretary to the President of the Council of Elders of Rapa Nui); Dr Kawika Winter (Professor of Biocultural Ecology, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa); Dr John Coates (Professor of Microbiology and Director Emeritus of the Energy & Biosciences Institute, UC Berkeley); and Dr Jennifer Kahn (Professor of Archaeology and Anthropology, College of William & Mary). Together, the intervenants extended the Land–Sea Resilience and Blue Bioeconomy threads developed across IH&S 2025 — Indigenous-led marine sanctuaries, biocultural stewardship, the carbon cycle as a financing pathway, and the integrated land–sea food systems work on taro and soil sequestration — into a public-policy register suited to CESEC's advisory mandate. In its closing message, CESEC's leadership thanked the panel for "honouring the Institution" and reinforcing the territory's collective resolve to protect the marine ecosystems that, in their words, are "véritables alliés de notre avenir" — true allies of Polynesia's future. The event illustrates the Sites Ateliers ambition embedded in Day 3 of IH&S 2025: that conference outputs should travel from the research station into the chambers where territorial policy is shaped.

Figure: Group Photo from CESEC Facebook Page

(A slight modification excerpted from David Zilberman’s blog) A Meeting with the President: A particularly exciting extension of the conference and this side event was a meeting with the President of French Polynesia, Moetai Brotherson, accompanied by his advisor, Léopold Biardeau. Zilberman wrote that they discussed the blue bioeconomy and that the president was enthusiastic about the ideas and engaged in thoughtful discussion around the research topics. David Zilberman wrote that “[the president’s] encouragement made it clear that our work aligns with the aspirations of local leadership, which gives me optimism about what we can accomplish together.”

IHS Moving the Missions Forward 

The IHS Conference intentionally centers four missions. This section highlights the metrics proposed, open questions and actions to move ahead in 2026. 


Mission 1: Transforming Island Food Systems

Food systems arrived at IH&S 2025 with a starting condition that frames every other choice: French Polynesia imports roughly 80% of its food, food transport accounts for over half of the territory's greenhouse-gas output, and the existing value chains — production, aggregation, processing, retail — are too fragmented for any single intervention to reach scale. The mission's strategic question this year was therefore not whether to act but where the leverage points actually are, and on what time horizon. The answer that emerged across the three days was a 5-to-10-year programme aligned with the territory's Schéma Directeur de l'Agriculture, with two named entry points — schools and the tourism sector — chosen because they are the two demand-side channels the territorial government can directly influence.

The mission's quantified five-year targets are now the most concrete of any mission at this conference: doubling organic agriculture, three new aquaculture projects, 100% sustainable fishing on Moʻorea and Tahiti, 50% reductions in pesticide and imported-fertiliser use, and a 50% increase in organic food in schools and tourism — building on the 25% local-school-food anchor first set in 2024. What the conference added in 2025 was a marine dimension the 2024 mission had treated as adjacent: IFREMER's revival of the indigenous Saccostrea rock oyster, and the broader case for low-trophic blue foods — algae, bivalves, sea cucumbers — as protein sources environmentally superior to terrestrial substitutes. The Tereheamanu citizen consultations on Tahiti added a third dimension: when six communes were asked to name essential needs, food sovereignty surfaced alongside drinking water and energy independence, suggesting that the mission's social licence is already assembled in the places where territorial planning will have to act.

The unsolved questions are organisational rather than technical. Funding remains fragmented across small instruments rather than concentrated; agroecological practice is hard to scale without making farming and fishing attractive professions, which is itself a generational pipeline problem the EPFPA and CFPPA training routes only partly address; and the pilot-island selection — which islands first, against which baselines — has not been made. The mission's most consequential cross-dependency is on Resilience: doubling organic agriculture in a watershed where contaminant transport to the lagoon is still being characterised by COCOPOL means food-system targets and land-sea contaminant work need to be sequenced together, not pursued in parallel. 

Actions and Next Steps for Mission 1 — Island Food Systems. The immediate next step is operational: identify the pilot islands and lock in the school-and-tourism procurement instruments through which the SDA-aligned five-year targets will be measured. Continue work on the 25%-local-school-food target piloted on Moʻorea, with extension to additional islands under the SDA, TAVIVAT, SATAP, and PTRA programmes. Carlson and collaborators' integrated land-sea planning work could be extended into agroecological siting decisions. The Hill workforce-development talk on California's Central Valley could be positioned as a comparative case for Polynesian agricultural training pipelines.

Mission 2: Marine Energy & Blue Bioeconomy

This was the most quantitatively developed of the four missions at IH&S 2025, and the tightest argument: French Polynesia imports approximately 350 million litres of fossil fuels per year, primarily for transport and electricity, and a seaweed-based biorefinery using roughly 365 km² of cultivated ocean — about 0.008% of the EEZ — could substitute up to 10% of that fuel demand and offset close to half of the territory's annual CO₂. The full envelope is in the order of $370 million per year of addressable market, with ethanol the dominant share, biostimulants and offsets in support, and Mayalen Zubia's chemodiversity case (531 documented species, the REMU and RIP BIOFENUA pipelines, Turbinaria ornata as the alginate anchor) holding the door open to higher-margin chemistry than the carrageenan markets where Indonesia and the Philippines already dominate.

The mission's productive disagreement was about whether the arithmetic survives engineering. David Scolari's life-cycle work showed the seaweed advantage over corn ethanol — no land-use competition, no freshwater demand, no synthetic fertiliser — collapses if processing is powered by French Polynesia's diesel-dominated grid, which means biorefineries must be co-located with the territory's growing solar capacity for biofuels to be complementary to renewables rather than substitutive. John Coates was equally direct that the territory is "behind the curve" on tropical seaweed research, and prescribed concrete next steps: GIS/satellite siting, paired LCA and techno-economic analysis, government activation on the Indonesian model, and environmental safeguards for reef ecosystems. Nigel Bradly's Aotearoa pipeline supplied the venture template; Ali Hill's Central Valley analogue, with the "baby carrot" model as its organising metaphor, made the case that an International Bioeconomy Macroalgae Center must be designed from the outset to use all biomass components and to raise wages alongside product quality, not merely substitute capital for labour.

Three problems remain unsolved. The Turbinaria tangle is the sharpest: the same proliferative biomass was advanced in Mission 1 as a biostimulant input, in this mission as the energy and chemistry feedstock, and in Mission 3 as a reef pathology requiring removal, and the species-identification, biomass-estimation, and harvest-rate questions that would let any of these proceed at commercial scale have not been resolved. The second is regulatory: the Indonesian model the mission is benchmarked against rests on a permitting regime that French Polynesia has not yet built, even though regulatory autonomy is plausibly the territory's strategic advantage (a point Mission 4 makes good on; this mission has not yet). The third is empirical: the Day 1 breakout's headline 2030 percentage was not captured in the available materials and remains unconfirmed. The next step is to converge on a single 2030 fuel-substitution target, paired with a co-location condition that ties cultivation expansion to renewable-grid availability rather than letting the two scale independently.

Actions and Next Steps for Mission 2 — Marine Energy & Blue Bioeconomy. Advance the macroalgae biorefinery concept presented by Zubia and the EnviroStrat / Blue Ventures life-cycle assessment toward demonstration scale, with the quantified pathway to roughly half of French Polynesia's carbon footprint as the framing target. Resolve the Turbinaria tangle — the species-identification, biomass-estimation, and harvest-rate questions that surfaced repeatedly across the seaweed sessions — as a precondition for any commercial deployment. Continued SWAC system development as a parallel decarbonisation pathway.

Mission 3: Land-Sea Resilience

Resilience is the only mission in the IH&S frame whose value is structurally integrative: where Health, Food, and Energy each pursue a sectoral goal, Resilience is what holds the watershed-to-reef system together while those other missions act on it. The geometry makes this concrete — French Polynesia has 4,500 km of coastline against a little over 4,000 km² of emerged land, almost the same coastline as metropolitan France with roughly one-hundredth the land area — so terrestrial activity, lagoon health, and economic activity are not separable problems that happen to be co-located. The mission's strategic question this year was therefore whether the territory could move from monitoring to a measurable goal, against a 2030 horizon, and the conference's honest answer was: not yet, but the infrastructure to make that move is now visible.

The September–October 2025 UPF land-sea continuum workshop produced an inventory of 39 long-term monitoring programmes, 11 databases, and 35 institutional actors — a known starting state that did not exist a year ago. COCOPOL, a multi-laboratory PPR-Océan programme led by SECOPOL and CRIOBE, enters the field with approximately €2 million over five to eight years and roughly 30 researchers already engaged, focused on contaminants across the land-sea continuum. The Tahuna Iti shoreline record at Tetiaroa — 70 years of imagery, 13 motu, 10 stable, one actively merging, one possibly disappearing at 5.5 m/year centroid shift — gives the mission a sentinel atoll against which atoll-scale climate impacts can be read with a clean baseline. CASUP 2.0 publishes in the Spring 2026 with a structural pivot from planning toward measurable compliance; Coral Gardeners is shifting its own metrics from "corals planted" to networked, smaller-site biodiversity measures aligned to emerging credit-market methodologies; on Palmyra, roughly 75% of the historical coconut plantation has been removed in service of restoring the seabird-derived nutrient subsidy to surrounding reefs.

What is missing is the prioritisation framework that would let any of this be ranked. Simon Ducatez's argument was direct: the territory's Climate Plan 2030 lists biodiversity objectives, but most have "unknown" initial states and "to be defined" targets, leaving conservation prioritisation effectively ad hoc. The Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework — 30% restoration, 30% protection, 50% IAS reduction by 2030 — was proposed as the global anchor against which a French Polynesian strategy should be calibrated; what does not yet exist is the operational tool that would weigh biological value, social and cultural importance, urgency, and feasibility against one another for any specific intervention. Three further challenges sharpen this. Financing through blue-carbon credits is contested on integrity grounds — Adrien Comte's caution against reference-scenario gaming and additionality problems should be read against the Voluntary Carbon Market arbitrage Mere Takoko named (Pacific issuers selling at $5 per tonne while Microsoft purchases CDR at $1,000 per tonne through the same verification systems) — and the mission's financing strategy needs an alternative anchor, plausibly Takoko's mauri-based standard. Data management is the rate-limiting infrastructure across every site; the operational bottleneck at Moku o Lo'e — abundant sensor datastreams undermined by inconsistent contribution-tracking — is the same bottleneck that surfaces at every other site under a different label. And restoration risks if metrics are not co-constructed with communities, the concern Ducatez raised on Day 1, and Kawika Winter's biocultural framing reinforced on Day 2. The breakout's specific 2030 goal language was not captured in the available transcripts and should be confirmed against the reporting slide. The immediate next step is to commit to the prioritisation framework Ducatez called for as a working tool, not an academic exercise.

Actions and Next Steps for Mission 3 — Land-Sea Resilience. Extend Fischer's automated multi-indicator shoreline analysis pipeline (XGBoost classification with transfer learning, IRD Trophées de l'Innovation 2025 nominee) across all atolls in French Polynesia. Continue Ducatez's biodiversity-and-restoration work on the land-sea continuum. Advance the Tereheamanu "territory of resilience" plan toward formal adoption following the citizen consultations completed in 2025.

Mission 4: Public Health — Mosquito-Borne Disease Elimination

Health was the founding IH&S mission, established in 2024, and at this conference, it functioned as the proof-of-concept that the other three missions are still working toward: a measurable, time-bound, place-based programme with active pilot sites, an industrial production facility, and a regulatory pathway under formal evaluation by WHO and the CDC. The strategic question for this mission in 2025 was no longer whether elimination was possible but on what terms a programme designed around a single technology could mature into a portfolio.

The technology base is now plural in a way it was not in 2024. The classical Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) and the Wolbachia-based Incompatible Insect Technique are both in active deployment, with the WHO-sponsored PacSIT programme running phase-3-to-phase-4 efficacy evaluation across three pilot sites — Tetiaroa, the Paea municipality on Tahiti's west coast (newly launched in November 2025, ILM's first community-scale deployment), and a forthcoming site in the Cook Islands. The Tinia mass-rearing facility on Tahiti's west coast supplies the production backbone; Craig Montell's trpVa-mutant work, with 0% fertilisation in laboratory crosses, identifies a candidate enhancement to next-generation SIT; and the IR007 repellent — complete protection times exceeding 12 hours, against roughly 5–6 hours for 25% DEET — opens a second front that protects humans rather than suppressing mosquitoes. The 2030 elimination target now has named candidate sites (Tetiaroa, Huahine, Moʻorea, Bora Bora) with Huahine retained as the original Mozeroa anchor.

Two unsolved problems carry forward. The first is regulatory and is the mirror image of the problem Mission 2 raised: where Energy is held back by permitting gaps relative to Indonesia, Health treats French Polynesia's regulatory autonomy as a strategic asset for technologies that face slower approval elsewhere — but autonomy, exercised carelessly, is also how trust is lost. The Paea launch is the first community-scale test of how that autonomy is exercised in practice, and it will be read as such. The second is that public acceptance of genetic interventions cannot be assumed — and the data infrastructure that would let community engagement be evidenced at the same pace as the science (iPlaces, FAIR+CARE governance) is being built in parallel rather than retrofitted, but is not yet in place. 

Actions and Next Steps for Mission 4 — Public Health (Mozeroa). The immediate next step is to exercise regulatory autonomy and community engagement as a paired discipline at Paea, with the Mozeroa 2030 Huahine workstream reading the Paea outcome before its own community-engagement phase opens. Continue the Mozeroa 2030 mosquito elimination workstream on Huahine. Integrate Bossin's ILM work on regulatory pathways with the broader argument made across Day 1 that French Polynesia's regulatory autonomy is the strategic asset for technologies — genetic, biocontrol, and otherwise — that face slower approval elsewhere.

Cross-Cutting Work 

Four threads surfaced, weaving across more than one mission, and could not be resolved within any single one of them. They are listed here not because the conference produced answers but because naming them as cross-cutting work — rather than as sectoral problems — is itself the prerequisite for action in 2026.

The Turbinaria tangle described in mission 2 on Energy: The same proliferative biomass — Turbinaria ornata, the brown macroalgae now overgrowing Moʻorea's reefs — was advanced across three missions in three different framings: as the alginate and biofuel feedstock anchoring the Energy mission's quantified pathway, as a candidate biostimulant in the Food mission's import-fertiliser-displacement target, and as a reef pathology requiring removal in the Resilience mission's restoration agenda. Each framing supports a different operational decision (cultivate, harvest, eradicate); none of them can be acted on without the others, because the species-identification, biomass-estimation, and harvest-rate questions are common to all three. This is a coordination problem masquerading as a taxonomic one. Until the underlying biological accounting is settled — what species, how much, at what rate of natural recruitment, with what reef impact — the three missions are in a position of stating compatible-sounding ambitions that may, on the same biomass, prove mutually exclusive.

Regulatory autonomy: chokepoint or strategic asset. French Polynesia's regulatory environment was framed in opposite valences by the missions that engaged it most directly. For Energy, it appeared as a permitting and regulatory gap relative to the Indonesian model — a bottleneck holding back the macroalgae biorefinery from demonstration scale. For Health, the same territorial autonomy is the strategic asset that has let ILM and ministry partners run SIT and IIT pilots, the WHO-sponsored PacSIT trials, and the November 2025 community launch at Paea on a timeline that would not have been possible elsewhere. 

The contradiction is real: the same institutional capacity that is too thin for one mission is exactly the capacity another mission has built its strategy around. The 2026 work is not to choose between these readings but to recognise that regulatory capacity, like research capacity, is a finite resource — and that the four missions are now drawing on it concurrently rather than sequentially. Mission 4's Paea deployment is, in this frame, a stress test of how that autonomy is exercised at the community scale; the other missions should read its outcome as a precedent for their own regulatory pathways.

Data sovereignty as operational infrastructure: Across all three days, the conference moved data sovereignty from an ethical principle to a precondition for evidence. Jane Anderson's surfacing of one million occurrence records with Indigenous metadata out of GBIF's three billion occurrence records, the IEEE's first Indigenous metadata standard, the Te Mauri Ora and Te Ora Fenua ethnocode and biocode projects, and the iPlaces platform under development for deployment at Gump and Tetiaroa in early 2026 are not parallel ethical commitments but the components of a single operational stack. If iPlaces and FAIR+CARE governance are built in parallel with mission deployments, evidence remains under community control; if they are retrofitted afterward, the missions accumulate a sovereignty debt that compounds across deployments. The Day 2 morning's case was that the digital infrastructure should be foundational rather than a downstream layer, and the four missions' 2026 plans should be read against whether they have made that choice.

The measurable-target gap. The four missions are not at the same stage of maturity, and the conference was honest about that. Health and Food now have concrete proposed 2030 numbers — invasive Aedes elimination at named atolls, doubled organic agriculture, 50% reductions in pesticide and imported fertiliser, 100% sustainable fishing on Moʻorea and Tahiti — paired to specific instruments (PacSIT pilots, the SDA, school and tourism procurement). Energy has a framing arithmetic of unusual quality — 365 km², 0.008% of the EEZ, ~$370 million addressable market, ~50% of CO₂ offsettable through fuel substitution. Resilience has named the absence as the problem itself: Ducatez's argument that a Climate Plan 2030 with "unknown" initial states and "to be defined" targets cannot prioritise conservation work was the most direct in the conference. Lolo Kleykamp's Theory of Change — start at impact and work backward — applies most sharply to the two missions that have not yet produced a goal from which to work backward. The 2026 work is to close that gap on terms that the missions themselves accept, rather than on terms imposed by funders.

Conclusion

The change between 2024 and 2025 is more than a year of further work on the same agenda. The 2024 meeting opened the IH&S series with one mature mission — mosquito-borne disease elimination, anchored by the Mozeroa 2030 workstream on Huahine — and a set of candidate missions sketched alongside it. The 2025 meeting convened those missions under an institutional umbrella that did not exist a year ago: RESIPOL, with its six founding members (UPF, ILM, IFREMER, IRD, CNRS, and UC Berkeley) all represented on the Programme Committee, gave the consortium a single venue under which Food, Energy, Resilience, and Health could be treated as parallel strategic missions rather than as adjacent projects. The data-sovereignty stack, the 2024 report had named as a need — Local Contexts metadata, the iPlaces platform, FAIR+CARE governance — moved over the year from concept to working components, with iPlaces scheduled for deployment at Gump and Tetiaroa in early 2026. The sites ateliers (Tetiaroa, Moʻorea, Tahiti, the EEZ, Palmyra, Moku o Loʻe, Rapa Nui) functioned in 2025 as the connective tissue of the programme rather than as case studies attached to thematic sessions, and the Communities of Inquiry framing of Day 2 made explicit the social and digital infrastructures the missions need to operate at island scale. The architecture of the convening became legible in 2025 in a way it was not in 2024, and the test in 2026 is whether that legibility translates into delivery on the four missions’ 2030 horizons.

The convening’s theory of change for 2026 takes the discipline Lolo Kleykamp brought to Day 2 and applies it to the consortium itself: start at the impacts the four missions are working toward, and work backward through the institutional capacity needed to deliver them. The forward commitments are concrete: a draft CASUP-2 plan with an April 2026 release date, the Honu deep-ocean platform’s first programmatic research committee meeting scheduled for January 2026, and an Ocean Environmental Leadership Program proposal endorsed from the floor. Set against these is a specific institutional risk the conference did not paper over. The geopolitical landscape is changing and requires diverse participation. RESIPOL’s six-institution structure is the right vehicle for navigating this landscape with resilience. The Social Capital Foundation’s continued partnership across both years of the series has helped anchor the convening as a recurring annual gathering, and it remains the kind of catalytic support the missions will require more of in 2026.

Closing the meeting, Davies described the arc of the three-day programme as a movement “from foresight (4-Site) to insight (N-site) to deep insight” — the foresight of 2024’s candidate missions, the insight of 2025’s institutional architecture, and the deep insight that the 2026 work, on the missions and on the redistribution alike, will be measured against.

Explore the Proceedings

This NotebookLM serves as an exploratory portal for the 2nd Island Health & Sustainability Conference, allowing you to navigate the transition from the "foresight" of the 2024 candidate missions to the "deep insight" of the 2025 institutional architecture. Through the provided sources and interactive artifacts, you can conduct deep dives into the four core missions—Food Systems, Marine Energy, Land-Sea Resilience, and Public Health—to examine specific 2030 targets and the operational frameworks supporting them.

Acknowlegdements

The Island Sustainability Research Fund at UC Berkeley is supported by the Social Capital Foundation.

Appendix I: Conference Attendees 

Name

Affiliation

Adrienne Correa

UC Berkeley

Alexander Mawyer

Univ of Hawaii

Alexandra E. Hill

UC Berkeley

Alida Kropf

ILM

Benoit Stoll

Univ. French Polynesia

Cedrik Lo

Fisheries Agency, DRMM PF

Craig Montell

UC Santa Barbara

Cristian Monaco

IFREMER Tahiti

Dave Vieglais

DataOne

David James Scolari

UC Berkeley

David Zilberman

UC Berkeley

Edith Gabriel

INRAe BioSP, Avignon

Emily WALKER

INRAE, Avignon

Erin Robinson

iPlaces, Metadata Gamechangers

Franck Lucas*

Univ. French Polynesia

Frank Murphy

Tetiaroa Society

Hannah Stewart

Coral Gardeners Labs

Hervé Bossin

ILM

Hetereki Huke

Conseil Coutumier Rapa Nui

Hinano Teavai Murphy

Association Te Pu Atitia

Jane Anderson

NYU; Local Contexts

Jayna DeVore

Univ. French Polynesia

Jean Wencélius

CNRS - CRIOBE, Rahui Center

Jean-Yves Meyer

Dept. of Research, Tahiti

Jennifer Kahn

William & Mary College

John Coates

UC Berkeley

John Marchioni

Senior Advisor, iPlaces Alliance

Kawika Winter

Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology

Larry Tchiou

Moorea Innovation Hub

Laurence (Lolo) Kleykamp

Social Capital Foundation

Maheata White Davies

UC Gump Station

Mark Hay

Georgia Tech

Mary Therese Hattori

E-W Center

Mayalen Zubia

Univ. French Polynesia

Megan Donahue

Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology

Mere Takoko

Pacific Whale Fund

Michael Bruno

University of Hawaii

Michele Stanley

Scottish Association of Marine Science (SAMS)

Mike Cheng

UC Berkeley; ELP

Neil Davies

UC Berkeley, Gump Station

Nigel Bradly

Envirostrat New Zealand

Nils Gilman

Berggruen Institute

Richard Bailey

Pacific Beachcomber Group; Tetiaroa Society

Simon Ducatez

IRD Tahiti

Stanley Rowland

Tetiaroa Society

Tamatoa Bambridge

CNRS - CRIOBE, Rahui Center

Béatrice Tanseau Bambridge

Rahui Center

Tea Frogier

Government of French Polynesia

Ted Habermann

Metadata Game Changers

Thiago Correa

UC Berkeley

Thierry Lison de Loma

Vaihuti Fresh

Tj Tate

Tetiaroa Society

Vainui Marakai

Government of French Polynesia

Victoria Rowland

iPlaces Alliance


Remote Participants:

Adrien Comte

IRD La Réunion

Alex Wegmann

The Nature Conservancy

Alex Kusenko

UCLA

Warren Essey

Kudu


Appendix II: Conference Agenda 

Day 1 (Tue 18) – Island Bioeconomies: From Missions to Markets 

09:00 Welcome and Contextualization 

  • Traditional welcome - Te Pu Atitia 

  • Welcome - RESIPOL 

09:10 Keynote: Island Earth: Governing in the Planetary Age

- Nils Gilman (Berggruen Institute) 

09:45 Session: FP Health & Sustainability Research (RESIPOL)

Chair: Neil Davies

  1. Innovative approaches to vector-borne disease - Hervé Bossin (ILM)

  2. Exploring tropical seaweed diversity - Mayalen Zubia (UPF)

  3. Te Ora Fenua | Te Mauri Ora - Adrienne Correa (UCB)

  4. Blue food systems - Cristian Monaco and Guillaume Mitta (IFREMER)

  5. Zone Atelier FP Long-Term Social-Ecological Research - Tamatoa Bambridge (CNRS)

  6. Towards a strategy to reduce the loss of and restore biodiversity in French Polynesia - Simon Ducatez (IRD)

11:15 - Coffee Break 

11:30 Session: Introduction to IH&S Missions 

Chair: Thierry Lison de Loma

  1. Eliminating mosquito-borne disease - Craig Montell (UCSB)

  2. Land-Sea resilience - Tamatoa Bambridge (CRIOBE) & Simon Ducatez (IRD)

  3. Food systems - Thierry Lison de Loma (Vaihuti Fresh)

  4. Energy: the pathway to decarbonize FP using seaweed - Thiago Correa (UCB)

12:30 Keynote: International Bioeconomy & Macroalgae Center  

- John Coates (UC Berkeley) 

Indonesia as a leading country in tropical seaweed: challenges, opportunities, and potential implications for French Polynesia

13:00 Lunch - Gump Waterfront Fare Pote’e

  • [conference photo] 

14:00 Keynote: Blue Natural Capital

- Mere Takoko (Pacific Whale Fund) 

14:30 Session: Te Ara Moana - Blue Pathways to Sustainability  

Chair: Larry Tchiou 

  1. Life Cycle Assessment for Biofuels in FP - David Scolari (UC Berkeley)

  2. Blue Bioeconomy in Aotearoa New Zealand: lessons and opportunities for collaboration - Nigel Bradly (Envirostrat NZ)

  3. Land-Sea Food Systems: Taro and Carbon Sequestration - Jenny Kahn (W&M)

  4. Land-Sea Restoration: Coral - Hannah Stewart (Coral Gardeners)

  5. Marine Resources and Island Innovation Strategies - Cedrik Lo (DRM)

  6. 15 minutes of discussion 

16:00 Breakouts: IH&S Missions

Facilitator: Erin Robinson 

Reporting Slide

  1. Food: Regenerative Food Systems Aquaculture/Agriculture - Thierry and Cristian

  2. Energy: Seaweed Biofuel - Thiago and Larry

  3. Resilience: Land-Sea Restoration & Resilience - Simon and Jean

  4. Health: Eliminating Vector-borne infectious disease - Hervé

17:00 Keynote: Blue Carbon Market Standards

- Adrien Conte (IRD, La Réunion)

17:30 Reception: Gump House

19:00 Dinner: Gump Waterfront Fare Pote’e

Day 2 (Wed 19) – Communities of Inquiry 

09:00 Keynote: Bioeconomy, Innovation, & Environmental Leadership 

- David Zilberman (UC Berkeley)

09:30 Session: Governance & Stewardship

Chair: Tamatoa Bambridge

  1. Biocultural stewardship: NERR Hawaii - Kawika Winter (Univ. Hawaii)

  2. Social License to Operate - Ali Hill (UC Berkeley) 

  3. Rights and Representation, including More Than Human - Jane Anderson (NYU)

  4. Whales: From personhood to Indigenous governance - Mere Takoko (Pacific Whale Fund) (video) 

10:30 Session: Informing Decision-makers: Ethics & Technology in Scholarly Publication 

Chair: Neil Davies (UCB)

  1. Mapping research outputs: the Tetiaroa use case - Benoit Stoll (UPF)

  2. Documenting research compliance - John Marchioni (Senior Advisor, iPlaces)

  3. Accelerating the translation of research to education - Warren Essey (Kudu) - remote

  4. iPlace(s) Data Trust: a place-based research platform - Dave Vieglais (NCEAS)

Hold questions until the end 

11:15 - Coffee Break 

11:30 Keynote: Atitia Center - 20 years of Culture & Education

- Hinano Murphy (Te Pu Atitia) 

12:00 Session: Education/Training - Curriculum Research & Development 

Chair: Maheata White Davies 

  1. Measuring educational impact of AI and Supplemental Math interventions with Kudu - Alex Kusenko (UCLA) - remote

  2. Marine Educational Areas (AME) - Vainui Marakai (DGEE ) 

  3. Workforce development in the Bioeconomy: lessons from California’s Central Valley - Ali Hill (UC Berkeley)

  4. Ocean Environmental Leadership Program - Thierry Lison de Loma, Larry Tchiou, Maheata White Davies 

13:00 Lunch - Gump Waterfront Fare Pote’e

14:00 Panel: Impact Framework

Chair: Neil Davies and Erin Robinson

Measuring impact: a funder’s perspective - Lolo Kleykamp (Social Capital Foundation)

ToC template.xlsx

15:00 Unconference: Project Development

To be decided - including but not limited to:

  1. Blue Carbon (Tamatoa Bambridge)

  2. Mozeroa (Hervé Bossin) 

  3. iPlaces (Erin Robinson)

  4. Others?

16:00 Unconference: Project Development (continued)

18:30 Tahitian Feast “ahima’a”: Atitia Center 

Day 3 (Thu 20) — Sites Ateliers

9:00 Keynote: Tetiaroa Conservation & Sustainable Use Plan 

- Stanley Rowland and Frank Murphy (Tetiaroa Society)  - CASUP, the First 10 Years

09:30 Session: Place-based Policy & Management: 4Site Network

Chair: Jayna DeVore

  1. Tetiaroa CASUP2: the next 10 years - Tj Tate (Tetiaroa Society)

  2. Palmyra - Alex Wegmann (remote) (TNC)

  3. Moorea & Tahiti Tereheamanu - Jean Wencélius and Tamatoa Bambridge (CRIOBE)

  4. Hawaii - Megan Donahue (HIMB) Michael Bruno (Univ. Hawaii) 

  5. 4Site: From Transects to Knowledge Transects - Alex Mawyer (Univ. Hawaii) - remote?

11:00 - Coffee Break 

11:30 Keynote 6: Honu Submarine International Sea Station Tahiti

- Richard Bailey (Tetiaroa Society, Pacific Beachcomber) 

11:45 Session: Blue Bioeconomies at Ocean Scales 

Chair/s: Tamatoa Bambridge

  1. Voice of the Ocean - Hinano Murphy (Te Pu Atitia)

  2. Moananui: Indigenous-led Marine Sanctuaries - Mere Takoko (Pacific Whale Fund)

  3. Traditional council Rapa Nui - Hetereki Huke (Conseil Coutumier Rapa Nui)

  4. Pacific Islands Development Program - Mary Therese Hattori (EW Center)

  5. Mapping Indigenous Seas - Alex Mawyer (Univ. Hawaii) - remote? 

13:00 Lunch - Gump Waterfront Fare Pote’e 

14:00 Concurrent Sessions

  • Tetiaroa CASUP-2 Committee Meeting

    • co-Chairs: Tj Tate and Stanley Rowland

  • Other sessions (to be decided)

    • iPlaces Planning - Erin 

16:00 Conclusions & Next Steps

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    Davies, N. , Bossin, H. , Zubia, M. , Bambridge, T. , Mitta, G. , Correa, A. , Ducatez, S. , & Robinson, E. (2026). 2025 Island Health & Sustainability Conference Proceedings. iPlaces Gump. https://doi.org/10.60950/3cb5a5bc-2d64-4936-8a7a-32cdecbe53ba