Perceptions of adaptation, resilience and climate knowledge in the Pacific

Abstract

Purpose While the South Pacific is often cited as highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, there is comparatively little known about how different groups perceive climate change. Understanding the gaps and differences between risk and perceived risk is a prerequisite to designing effective and sustainable adaptation strategies. Design/methodology/approach This research examined three key groups in Samoa, Fiji and Vanuatu: secondary school teachers, media personnel, and rural subsistence livelihood-based communities that live near or in conservation areas. This study deployed a dual methodology of participatory focus groups, paired with a national mobile phone based survey to gauge perceptions of climate change. This was the first time mobile technology had been used to gather perceptual data regarding the environment in the South Pacific. Findings The research findings highlighted a number of important differences and similarities in ways that these groups perceive climate change issues, solutions, personal vulnerability and comprehension of science among other factors. Practical implications These differences and similarities are neglected in large-scale top-down climate change adaptation strategies and have key implications for the design of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation and therefore sustainable development in the region. Originality/value The research was innovative in terms of its methods, as well as its distillation of the perceptions of climate change from teachers, media and rural communities.

Small island perspectives on climate change

“…The papers included show that different island groups have different priorities and needs, which are often not accounted for. Instead climate change programs tend to didactically pass down directives and crowd out issues which are perceived as greater local concerns (Baldacchino & Kelman, 2014;Walshe et al, 2017).…”

Measuring Peripherality as a Proxy for Autonomous Community Coping Capacity: A Case Study from Bua Province, Fiji Islands, for Improving Climate Change Adaptation

“…Finally, it was found that there is a number of variables which measure peripherality by the types of knowledges routinely used/accessed for decision-making by communities that in turn help identify their resilience-dependence character, something critical to measuring peripherality in many contexts (Felzensztein et al 2013;Nunn and Kumar 2018). The number of mobile phones per capita, while admittedly not adequately capturing global knowledge access/use in Bua, is nevertheless considered key to measuring peripherality; a stage is likely to be reached in the future when novelty/social uses of mobile phones may be replaced by largely practical ones (Walshe et al 2018; Watson and Duffield 2016). The use of (and implicit trust in) traditional versus 'western' healthcare is also considered a measure of actual peripherality (rather than simply distance along a core-periphery gradient).…”

Flash Flood Risk Perception by the Population of Mindelo, S. Vicente (Cape Verde)

“…Risk management is, therefore, the modulated mental models and the psychological mechanisms that people use to judge, evaluate, tolerate, and react to risks [16]. Furthermore, it is how individuals and communities perceive the complex and varied factors which interfere in risk perception, such as social networks and capital, media influence, personal experience, values, worldviews, and the influence of individual adaptation strategy through learning from past events [17][18][19][20][21].…”