65 million people across 39 Small Island Developing States face the same structural public safety conditions. ISPI's research connects Hawaii's findings to the world — through the Samoa Pathway, BPOA+30, and the SIDS global bridge.
The United Nations designates 39 Small Island Developing States — covering Pacific Ocean, Caribbean Sea, Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, and Mediterranean Sea island nations — as a distinct category of developing country facing specific structural challenges: geographic isolation, small economies, environmental vulnerability, and limited institutional capacity. All four of these structural challenges produce direct public safety consequences. ISPI's research documents those consequences and the frameworks that address them.
Four UN framework documents govern the international community's obligations to SIDS communities. The Barbados Programme of Action (1994) established the foundational framework. The Mauritius Strategy (2005) added climate and disaster dimensions. The Samoa Pathway (2014) — the current governing framework — covers sustainable development, climate change, disaster risk reduction, and governance capacity. The BPOA+30 Review (2024-2025) is the current active review process. ISPI research published during the BPOA+30 review window that references this process will be cited in international policy documentation for the next decade.
The Pacific SIDS include Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. These nations share the governance capacity challenges documented in ISPI-WP10 — institutional analytical frameworks insufficient to independently evaluate complex bilateral security agreements — and the supply chain singularity vulnerability documented in ISPI-WP06. The Pacific Islands Forum's Biketawa Declaration invocation in May 2026 for the regional energy crisis demonstrated supply chain singularity at regional scale across 18 Pacific nations simultaneously.
Caribbean SIDS include Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago. Jamaica's 43% homicide reduction in 2025 — and the U.S. State Department travel advisory downgrade from Level 3 to Level 2 that followed — represents the most significant law enforcement and community policing outcome in the Caribbean in recent years. ISPI's WP-07 community policing framework applies directly to the Caribbean context. CARICOM IMPACS and CDEMA are the regional institutional partners for ISPI's Caribbean research engagement.
The Indian Ocean SIDS include Comoros, Maldives, Mauritius, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Seychelles. The Maldives imports virtually all fuel and food — a supply chain singularity condition that the 2025 Strait of Hormuz disruptions demonstrated in real time. Resort operators across the Indian Ocean corridor now face the same documented supply chain vulnerability exposure that ISPI's Island-Resilient Certification was designed to measure and document. Sri Lanka's recovery from Cyclone Ditwah — November 2025, $4.1B in damage, 2.3 million people affected — documents the scale of island disaster recovery challenges that FEMA frameworks were not designed to address.