The conference theme for IPMEN ’10 is Vakarau ni se siga toka - Marine education in the new millennium. Vakarau ni se siga toka is something Fijian elders used to say (and still do today, but rarely), which translated means “Start preparing while we’ve still got daylight.”

With that theme in mind the IPMEN ’10 conference committee will call for papers in the following four strands.

Strand 1: Key Challenges in Ocean Literacy: Assessing gaps in current marine education content, projects, materials and delivery approaches (books, webinars, dvds, field excursions, etc.).

Strand 2: Building Healthy Sustainable Coastal Communities: Integrating community-based science and traditional ecological knowledge into formal and non-formal marine education.

Strand 3: Women in Fisheries Partnerships for Change: Understanding women’s changing roles and gender relations in fisheries, and exploring ways to use their knowledge and skills in fisheries development and management and to address climate impacts on fishing communities.

Strand 4: How Does Climate Change Affect Children of the Pacific? Exploring the impacts of climate change and unpredictable weather patterns on the children of the Pacific and their families, e.g., their family livelihoods, their health, their education, their emotional wellbeing and their access to water as a result of floods, storms, cyclones and drought which are affected by the increasingly unpredictable weather.