Whilst future air temperature thresholds have become the centrepiece of international climate negotiations, even the most ambitious target of 1.5 °C will result in significant sea-level rise and associated impacts on human populations globally. Of additional concern in Arctic regions is declining sea ice and warming permafrost which can increasingly expose coastal areas to erosion particularly through exposure to wave action due to storm activity. Regional variability over the past two decades provides insight into the coastal and human responses to anticipated future rates of sea-level rise under 1.5 °C scenarios. Exceeding 1.5 °C will generate sea-level rise scenarios beyond that currently experienced and substantially increase the proportion of the global population impacted. Despite these dire challenges, there has been limited analysis of how, where and why communities will relocate inland in response. Here, we present case studies of local responses to coastal erosion driven by sealevel rise and warming in remote indigenous communities of the Solomon Islands and Alaska, USA, respectively. In both the Solomon Islands and the USA, there is no national government agency that has the organisational and technical capacity and resources to facilitate a community-wide relocation. In the Solomon Islands, communities have been able to draw on flexible land tenure regimes to rapidly adapt to coastal erosion through relocations. These relocations have led to ad hoc fragmentation of communities into smaller hamlets. Government-supported relocation initiatives in both countries have been less successful in the short term due to limitations of land tenure, lacking relocation governance framework, financial support and complex planning processes. These experiences from the Solomon Islands and USA demonstrate the urgent need to create a relocation governance framework that protects people's human rights.

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There is growing consensus that voluntary labour migration can promote economic development in migrant sending and receiving countries and can be a positive adaptive response to the effects of climate change. However, for voluntary migration to be a positive form of adaptation, policy commitment and collaboration between migrant sending and receiving countries will be required. In the Pacific, Australia has capacity to collaborate with Pacific Island governments to facilitate voluntary migration; however, Australia has been reluctant to expand migration access to the Pacific. This article makes the case for promoting migration opportunities between Australia and the Pacific as part of the adaptive strategy efforts.

This thesis examines power relations in the context of social impact assessment (SIA) as it is applied in the emerging mining industry in Solomon Islands. While the social impacts of large-scale mining in the Global South are well documented, little is known about how and why adverse social impacts continue to occur in the presence of numerous 'best practice' policy and planning tools, including SIA. This raises questions on the efficacy of SIA in identifying, contextualising and mitigating potential social impacts on communities affected by mining activity, particularly on traditional lands inhabited by indigenous peoples.This thesis presents a critical analysis of SIA to provide insight on this disparity in policy and practice, and to enhance sociological understanding on the interplay of globally-driven mining projects, the identification of social impacts, and the role of policy and institutions in cross-cultural contexts. The proposed extraction of nickel in Isabel Province, Solomon Islands, serves as the case study for this analysis. Employing the conceptual frameworks of social justice and political ecology, and drawing on six months' fieldwork in Solomon Islands, qualitative data from individual and group interviews (n=33) and document analysis (n=11) was collected across geopolitical scales -international, national, provincial and local -to compare and analyse perspectives of documents, institutions and people towards SIA and socially just development in the context of potential mining activity. Analysis of these perspectives exposed the extent to which SIA produces, reinforces and/or exacerbates, social injustices.Research findings identified the limits of SIA in: 1) recognising and accounting for indigenous identities and gender roles; 2) the unequal distribution of economic and other resources associated with the development of mining, including the privatisation of land and employment; and 3) representation of project-affected communities through consultation activities associated with SIA, including Free, Prior and Informed Consent. With political ecology as the foundation of this thesis, this thesis argues that these social injustices materialise as a result of a disparity, or mismatch, between knowledge frames across scales.While SIA is bounded to the rhetoric of social justice, consent and participation, this thesis demonstrates that Western expert knowledge and norms are interwoven into the SIA regime, rendering local experiential knowledge marginal. Reflecting this, a multiscale SIA approach is proposed to include consideration of different scales of knowledge systems, iii with outcomes that might assist to mitigate social injustices, such as those identified in this