Principles to guide research and policy on psychological well-being in remote island developing states in the South Pacific

Abstract

Adverse climatic changes around the globe and predictions of catastrophic and irreversible alteration in global weather patterns, temperature rise, and coast-line habitability require a careful examination of consequences on the resilience and mental health of people who will endure these changes. This paper is concerned with the South Pacific region. This geography has benefited from a relatively stable climate that is seen in the lush and vibrant natural world with many unique species of plants and animals exclusively found here. This paper examines the psychological profile of the people in the South Pacific using an evolutionary framework, and considers their local climate risks and lifestyle patterns with the aim of exploring possible mental health trajectories.

Keywords: South Pacific; cross-cultural psychology; human evolution; mental health; resilience.

Figure 1

Reconstruction of the past 5 million years of climate history, based on oxygen isotope fractionation (serving as a proxy for the total global mass of glacial ice sheets. Glacial models using ice cores enables understanding Earth’s past climates. Cores from glaciers are used to analyse layers of ice that have accumulated over millennia. Oxygen isotope analysis helps infer past temperatures, with the ratio of oxygen isotopes varying with temperature. The physical properties of ice and trapped air bubbles within it provide insights into historical atmospheric conditions. The graph here indicates that temperature fluctuations have become increasingly amplified in the last 3 million years: (A) Temperature variation between 5.3 and 3 mya is 1x. (B) Temperature variation between 3 and 1 mya is 2x relative to (A). (C) Temperature variation in the last 1 my is 2.8x relative to (A). This “LR04” stack is based on 38,000 individual δ ¹⁸ O measurements from 57 globally distributed sites. δ ¹⁸ O is a measure of the ratio of stable isotopes oxygen-18 and oxygen-16. The graph was constructed based on data published in Lisiecki et al. (14).