Facilitating climate change adaptation and engagement by understanding risks and climate behaviours: An assessment of future sea-level rise risks and climate change community perceptions in Fiji
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 end of the Pacific? Effects of sea level rise on Pacific Island livelihoods
As in the past, most Pacific Island people live today along island coasts and subsist largely on foods available both onshore and offshore. On at least two occasions in the 3500 years that Pacific Islands have been settled, sea level changes affected coastal bioproductivity to the extent that island societies were transformed in consequence. Over the past 200 years, sea level has been rising along most Pacific Island coasts causing loss of productive land through direct inundation (flooding), shoreline erosion and groundwater salinization. Responses have been largely uninformed, many unsuccessful. By the year 2100, sea level may be 1.2 m higher than today. Together with other climate-linked changes and unsustainable human pressures on coastal zones, this will pose huge challenges for livelihoods. There is an urgent need for effective and sustainable adaptation of livelihoods to prepare for future sea level rise in the Pacific Islands region. There are also lessons to be learned from past failures, including the need for adaptive solutions that are environmentally and culturally appropriate, and those which appropriate decision makers are empowered to design and implement. Around the middle of the twenty-first century, traditional coastal livelihoods are likely to be difficult to sustain, so people in the region will need alternative food production systems. Within the next 20-30 years, it is likely that many coastal settlements will need to be relocated, partly or wholly. There are advantages in anticipating these needs and planning for them sooner rather than later. In many ways, the historical and modern Pacific will end within the next few decades. There will be fundamental irreversible changes in island geography, settlement patterns, subsistence systems, societies and economic development, forced by sea level rise and other factors.