By Emily McGhee
Science alone will not solve the climate crisis. To appropriately manage and address climate change and impending natural disasters in the South Pacific, policy makers, scientists, and indigenous leaders must bridge the gap between hard science, its solutions, and traditional indigenous knowledge.
Islands in the South Pacific are in a particularly vulnerable position. They are already feeling the effects of climate change. Adaptions are already taking place for people to be able to deal with the changes that come with climate change and climate disasters happening in the region. Policymakers turn to hard science to “answer questions of how communities should deal with climate challenges” (Finucane 1). However, effective risk management enacted by indigenous communities in response to climate change and natural disasters has already taken place for centuries. Indigenous knowledge remains a largely untapped source of knowledge for dealing with climate change in the South Pacific.
The IPCC cites that environmental conditions will worsen in the South Pacific. Rising sea levels will worsen a variety of environmental factors such as flooding, storm surge, erosion, coastal hazards, etc. These factors are compounded by the issues that pacific island nations face due to the nature of their existence and locations. Their small sizes, disaster risk, isolation, low adaptive capacity, and the cost of adaptation relative to GDP all make for incredible difficulties in implementing exclusively scientifically based adaptation strategies in the region.
Scientific models are not the whole picture when it comes to looking at risk. When climate scientists analyze risk they tend to look at it mainly from the scientific perspective analyzing temperature, water availability, crop yields, etc. This however ignores the considerable social risks tied to climate change and the associated responses from society. In the Pacific, factors such as the movement of outer island rural communities to population centers, low income, unemployment, high national debt, and poor infrastructure compound the problem.
To add to this issue, climate models of the south pacific tend to not be detailed enough which causes problems for local actors to make decisions based on them. When decision makers are unable to use scientific data properly in policy making it erodes trust in the institutions and also in the science itself. Distrust also occurs in the difference between science and what is observed. Such distrust is more common in those of lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
Historically, Pacific island countries have adapted to harsh weather conditions. Generations of traditional knowledge about the local environment and how to deal with the conditions have allowed people to thrive in the region with little intervention from western scientific ideas. Many pacific cultures use oral tradition, storytelling, and local observation to understand climate patterns and signs. The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric in New Zealand has begun documenting traditional environmental and climate knowledge from Maori and Samoan peoples. Connecting traditional and modern knowledge to explain traditional phenomena in terms of science helps to fill the gaps in modern science while allowing for better communication about the issues that climate change and disasters present.
Ultimately, policymakers must address risk management by looking at strategies that involve indigenous, local, and cultural components to ensure widespread and effective implementation. Advocacy, in this sense, to not just create short-term solutions but also address long-term problems is challenging but involves combining both local and traditional approaches from actors on both sides, and works to fully tackle the human-climate relationship in the south pacific.
FINUCANE, MELISSA L. Why Science Alone Won’t Solve the Climate Crisis: Managing Climate Risks in the Pacific. East-West Center, 2009, http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep16011. Accessed 08 May 2022.
