Over the past decades, atoll islands exhibited no widespread sign of physical destabilization in the face of sea-level rise. A reanalysis of available data, which cover 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls including 709 islands, reveals that no atoll lost land area and that 88.6% of islands were either stable or increased in area, while only 11.4% contracted. Atoll islands affected by rapid sea-level rise did not show a distinct behavior compared to islands on other atolls. Island behavior correlated with island size, and no island larger than 10 ha decreased in size. This threshold could be used to define the minimum island size required for human occupancy and to assess atoll countries and territories' vulnerability to climate change. Beyond emphasizing the major role of climate drivers in causing substantial changes in the configuration of islands, this reanalysis of available data indicates that these drivers explain subregional variations in atoll behavior and within-atoll variations in island and shoreline (lagoon vs. ocean) behavior, following atoll-specific patterns. Increasing human disturbances, especially land reclamation and human structure construction, operated on atoll-to-shoreline spatial scales, explaining marked within-atoll variations in island and shoreline behavior. Collectively, these findings highlight the heterogeneity of atoll situations. Further research needs include addressing geographical gaps (Indian Ocean, Caribbean, north-western Pacific atolls), using standardized protocols to allow comparative analyses of island and shoreline behavior across ocean regions, investigating the role of ecological drivers, and promoting interdisciplinary approaches. Such efforts would assist in anticipating potential future changes in the contributions and interactions of key drivers.
International audienceThis article advocates for a dynamic and comprehensive understanding of vulnerability to climate-related environmental changes in order to feed the design of adaptation future pathways. It uses the Trajectory of Exposure and Vulnerability (TEV) approach that it defines as ‘storylines of driving factors and processes that have influenced past and present territorial system exposure and vulnerability to impacts associated with climate variability and change’. The study is based on the analysis of six peer-reviewed Pacific island case studies covering various geographical settings (high islands vs low-lying reef islands, urban vs rural) and hazards associated with climate variability and change; and that addressed the interactions between natural and anthropogenic driving factors; and adopted multi-decadal past-to-present approaches. The findings emphasize that most urban and rural reef and high islands have undergone increasing exposure and vulnerability as a result of major changes in settlement and demographic patterns, lifestyles and economies, natural resources availability and environmental conditions. The paper highlights three generic and successive periods of change in the studied islands’ TEV: from geopolitical and political over the colonization-to-political independence period; to demographic, socio-economic and cultural from the 1960s to the 1980s; culminating in the dominance of demographic, socio-economic, cultural and environmental drivers since the 1980s. Based on these empirical insights, the paper emphasizes the existence of anthropogenic-driven path-dependency effects in TEV, thus arguing for the analysis of the temporal dimensions of exposure and vulnerability to be a pre-requisite for science to be able to inform policy- and decision-making processes towards robust adaptation pathways
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