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Social and cultural issues raised by climate change in Pacific Island countries: an overview

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Abstract

Climate-related disasters such as tropical cyclones, floods and droughts are not new to Pacific Islanders, who have developed customary or ‘traditional’ practices to enable communities to adapt and recover from such hazards. Some of these practices have been degraded and some assisted by modernisation. Through their effects on the island environment, these hazards have a range of socio-economic impacts on food (fisheries and crops) and water supply, tourism, and coastal buildings and infrastructure. The varied impacts of climate change not only exacerbate those hazards but also raise new threats, such as sea level rise and ocean acidification, that have no precedent in the past 500 years, and for which there are therefore no traditional adaptations, although Pacific innate ingenuity and resilience remains strong. These issues are particularly acute for the low-lying atoll countries whose continued existence is threatened by sea level rise, but also affect those that live on higher islands in coastal settlements, where most of their population is concentrated. Climate change thus sharpens social and cultural issues of equity (reflecting disparities in location, income, education, gender, health and age), made even more acute by increased levels of voluntary or forced migration within, and even more so beyond, island country boundaries. Consequently, many islanders see climate change as a moral challenge to the richer countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions that are causing the problem.

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Fig. 1
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Notes

  1. Cook Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Marshall Islands and Tuvalu each have populations of <50,000.

  2. See Pittock and Weir (2016) or (Kumar 2016) for a brief summary of the key provisions of the Paris Agreement from a SIDS perspective.

  3. The latter view drives the SIDS insistence on having a Loss and Damage mechanism under the Paris Agreement.

  4. The Pacific Community (its new name since November 2015) was founded in 1947 as the South Pacific Commission and known since then mainly by those initials (SPC)—including still on its own website!.

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Acknowledgments

This paper draws heavily on material TW and DO have used for teaching at the University of the South Pacific that LD has used for scholarship and teaching at SPREP and at the Australian National University, and on various presentations made by all the authors over the years, particularly those given by TW to the Pacific Youth Festival in 2009 and to the KLIMA2012 online conference, which was subsequently published in a Springer book (Weir and Orcherton 2013). We thank students and festival participants and an anonymous referee of KLIMA2012 for their helpful feedback to an earlier version. We also acknowledge the comments from two anonymous referees for Regional Environmental Change and thank those who have given us permission to use their photographs, notably NTNK Video of Kiribati and Dr. Mike Gosling.

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  1. Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Tony Weir & Liz Dovey

  2. Centre for Sustainable Technology and Development, Fiji National University, Nabua, Fiji

    Dan Orcherton

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  1. Tony Weir
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Weir, T., Dovey, L. & Orcherton, D. Social and cultural issues raised by climate change in Pacific Island countries: an overview. Reg Environ Change 17, 1017–1028 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-016-1012-5

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