Marshall Islands

The Guardian reports that Nauru's move comes after an alleged illegal operation by a Taiwanese ship caught near its waters by Greenpeace last week.

Transhipments enable fleets to remain in, and plunder, ocean fishing grounds for years at a time while dodging mechanisms which monitor their catch

The Nauru Fisheries and Marine Resources Authority says the crackdown on vessels unloading their catch to "motherships" at sea would help "end the laundering of fish" by high seas "pirates".

The finalists for the prestigious industry award were unveiled last week at the sixth edition of Seafood Expo Asia in Hong Kong. Dawn Martin, President of SeaWeb, was joined by Suzanne Gendron, Director of the Ocean Park Foundation in Hong Kong and a 2016 Seafood Champion Awards Judge, to make the announcement to a crowd of seafood industry professionals and media.

 who is assisting health authorities and the College of the Marshall Islands to establish nurse practitioner and public health training programs for existing health staff.

During a visit to Majuro, Dever, who is based in Palau, said he was delighted to see that six public health nurses had graduated from the local college’s certificate program, and seven more are in the pipeline and will graduate soon.

Nurse supervisor “Hillia Langrine said there have been noticeable improvements as a result of this certificate training at the college,” said Dever.

Rongelap Mayor James Matayoshi said this week that the first harvest is just a few weeks away. The fish farming work is being run by the Atoll Technologies of the Marshall Islands or ATMI, a local company in partnership with off-shore investors that was developed by the Rongelap Atoll Local Government with the aim of developing fish farming export ventures on remote atolls around this western Pacific nation.

“I hope over the next three to five years, we will mature as a big company for export markets,” he said. “The market is there in the United States and Asia.”

The leaders of the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau and Tuvalu caught up on Monday before the wider 16 nation Pacific Island Forum leaders summit in Papua New Guinea later this week.

They issued a special declaration on climate change that demanded the world limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius and that countries uphold the principle of polluter pays.

Fredrick Muller arrived in Taiwan Aug 25 to take up his post as ambassador, said Elliot Charng, director-general of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' Department of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, at a regular news briefing.

Prior to his posting in Taipei, Muller was his country's ambassador to Fiji, according to the foreign ministry. His previous posts also included serving as a member of the Marshall Islands parliament 2008-2012, the ministry said.

Or they've simply refused to show up to meetings to discuss audit plans.

In a letter last week to the Speaker of the Marshall Islands Parliament, Auditor General Junior Patrick said his office had to resort to issuing subpoenas to obtain routine financial records or in one case to force a local government mayor to show up for an audit meeting.

In delivering his semi-annual report, he told the speaker that the problem of government officials not cooperating with financial accountability requirements is still ongoing.

This week's Purse Seine Bigeye Tuna Management Workshop in Majuro was told commercial fishing boats caught over 2.8 million tons of tuna in 2014, an all-time record.

Most of those fish were caught by purse seiners.

The Marshall Islands Marine Resources Authority scientist, Berry Muller, says the bigeye tuna catch at 161,299 tonnes was a five percent increase.

He says this maintains bigeye's "over-fished" state.

Periodic SOE reports serve as a "health check-up" for the environment and environmental services upon which the people of the Marshall Islands depend. The results from these reports feed directly into strategic environmental planning, which seeks to protect the healthy parts of RMI's environmental systems and improve other parts that are in decline.

A two day State of the Environment Report write-shop and National Environmental Management Strategy consultation was held in the Marshall Islands this month.

But at the Waan Aelon in Majel training centre, the sounds signify more than simply carpenters at work: here, young people who left school before the age of 13 are learning to build outrigger canoes as they immerse themselves in the culture of their ancestors.

“A hundred years ago, everyone had a position in life as fishermen, weavers and local medicine experts,” says Alson Kelen, who has directed the youth programme at the training centre for 20 years. “Everyone participated in the culture. Today, kids are lost – they don’t know where to fit in.”