This PhD project aims to extend climate change adaptation research by understanding the physical exposure of a place and the perceptions of the people occupying that space. There is scientific consensus that climate change will amplify existing environmental risks and have unequal impacts on human societies worldwide. The people living in small island developing states (SIDS) are at the frontline of the impacts of climate change due to high levels of exposure and low adaptive capacity. Using data from recent fieldwork, this study assesses the exposure and perceptions of people living in Labasa (a coastal-deltaic rural-urban area developed on a flood plain) in northern Fiji in the South Pacific. Even though risks associated with future sea level rise (SLR) are generally recognised for coastal areas, risks specific to certain landforms, such as river deltas, are understudied. This study provides an assessment of future risks from global SLR and storm surges under SLR in the Labasa Delta. The inundation maps produced through the risk assessment show that both the natural (vegetation and hydrological network) and the built (roads, communities, and infrastructure) environments in the river delta are at inundation risk from future SLR. Despite growing behavioural and attitudinal data on climate change in developed countries, little is known about the determinants of climate behaviours in developing countries. The second main aim of the current study is to provide the first set of representative psychological and behavioural data for the Pacific Islands region with tested hypothesised relationships. To this end, a survey of climate change perceptions amongst a national representative Fijian sample (N = 420), derived through random sampling was conducted throughout the study area. The survey collected both demographic (age, gender, education, employment, and land tenure) and psychological (knowledge, information, risk perception, self-efficacy) data, and investigated the relationship between these variables and climate change adaptation behavioural intentions. As hypothesised, multiple regression analyses identified affective associations, psychological proximity, flood experience, risk perceptions, and self-efficacy as determinants of pro-climate behaviours in Fiji. The results also found a greater engagement with climate change amongst racial majorities (iTaukei), males, and educated people. The findings did not support the hypothesis that increasing objective knowledge, belief, and trust in information sources determines climate behaviours. Although relationships existed between objective knowledge, belief, trust, and the behavioural intention variables, these came out as non-significant predictors. Overall, these results contribute to global research on climate change adaptation. By examining two important aspects - the likely inundation in the Labasa delta because of sea level rise and the perceptions of people in the Labasa area of climate change, the project fills a significant recognised research gap on islands. Previous climate change studies on islands have neither focused on local impacts in peripheral locations, nor looked at people's perceptions in such vulnerable places. The results of this research project provide a baseline of perceptions and vulnerabilities for islands that can aid in the design of future adaptation and risk communication strategies for vulnerable communities in Fiji and the wider Asia-Pacific region. It is expected that the results will offer stakeholders evidence-based advice and important insights on how to make climate change adaptation efforts more sustainable and community-inclusive than current practice.

The comment by Hall and Sanders raises some issues we are able to clarify. These authors also criticize our study for its omissions, something we regard as inevitable in a one-off study of this nature. We contend that neither of these concerns invalidate our study's conclusions. Hall and Sanders's first criticism concerns sampling and interpretation and is prefaced by the rhetorical question "of whom can the authors legitimately speak?" At the time of the study, both authors had interacted with both communities in the Rewa Delta for more than 20 years, each author speaking one of their two vernacular languages (Fiji Hindi and Bauan-Fijian) and being intimate with their cultural mores, attributes that allowed us privileged access to these communities for the purpose of the study. Interviewee selection was not "haphazard". In both study sites, we were constrained in this by gender, age, language, relatedness, status, and religious affiliation, all of which affected our ability to freely speak to those we might have targeted had we not been so encumbered yet we are satisfied that the 64 people we interviewed (selected by age, gender and residence time) represented a cross-section of the target population in each community. Full details of interviewees are given in Lata's MSc thesis (Lata 2010), which was referenced several times in our paper (Lata and Nunn 2012). We are indeed somewhat "startled" that Hall and Sanders overlooked this. A requirement that potential interviewees must have been continuously resident in our sample locations for 30 years is not "troubling" to us. We used a 30-year figure because (1) our experience of gathering environmental-change data from Pacific Island communities suggests that this was the optimal period needed to comprehensively exclude persons who might give misleading information2 and (2) flood data in particular suggest that this is the period within which recent climate-change effects are detectable, something on which we sought to allow our informants to comment. As we explain in our paper, "although the specific data analysed in this paper were obtained from individual interviews, these were supplemented by focus-group discussions in appropriate cultural situations for the purposes of understanding both the broader context and canvassing group views" (Lata and Nunn 2012: 174).

Pacific Island Countries are highly exposed to climate change. Most impact studies have focused on the most densely populated core areas where top-down governance is most effective. In contrast, this research looks at peripheral (rural/outer-island) communities where long-established systems of environmental governance exist that contrast markedly with those which governments and their donor partners in this region favour. Peripheral communities in the Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, and Vanuatu were studied. Traditional systems of environmental governance are described, and three common barriers to effective and sustainable climate-change adaptation identified. The first is lack of awareness among key community decision makers about climate change and associated environmental sustainability that could be lessened by targeted awareness raising. The second is the inappropriateness of traditional decision-making structures for dealing with both the complexity and pace of climate-driven environmental changes. The third is the short-term views of resource management and sustainability held by many community decision makers. Despite 30 years of assistance, there has been negligible effective and sustainable adaptation for climate change in peripheral parts of Pacific Island Countries, something that is explicable by both the ineffectiveness of top-down approaches in such places as well as a lack of attention to the nature and the context of adaptation communications. It is timely for interventions to be made at community level where the greatest disconnect lies between the science and stakeholder awareness of climate change.

While increasing research is focusing on the effective adaptation to climate change in richer (developed) countries, comparatively little has focused specifically on this subject in poorer (developing) countries such as most in the Pacific Islands region. A significant barrier to the development of effective and sustainable adaptive strategies for climate change in such places is the gap between risk and perceived risk. This study looks at a vulnerable location in Fiji - the densely populated Rewa River Delta where environmental changes resulting from shoreline retreat and floods are expected to increase over the next few decades and entail profound societal disruption. The numbers of people living in the Rewa Delta who know of climate change and could correctly identify its contributory causes are few although many rank its current manifestations (floods, riverbank erosion, groundwater salinization) as among their most serious environmental challenges. While lack of awareness is a barrier to adaptation, there are also cultural impediments to this such as short-term planning perspectives, spiritual beliefs, traditional governance structures. One way forward is to empower community leaders in places like the Rewa Delta to make appropriate decisions and for regional governments to continue working together to find solutions that acknowledge the variation in sub-regional trans-national vulnerability to climate change.