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Dealing with Climate Change on Small Islands: Towards Effective and Sustainable Adaptation?

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Dealing with Climate Change on Small Islands: Towards Effective and Sustainable Adaptation? mall islands have received growing attention in the context of climate Schange. Rising sea-levels, intensifying storms, changing rainfall patterns and increasing temperatures force islanders to deal with and Carola Klöck and Michael Fink (eds.) adapt to a changing climate. How do they respond to the challenge? What works, what doesn’t – and why? The present volume addresses these questions by exploring adaptation Dealing with climate change on experiences in small islands across the world’s oceans from various perspectives and disciplines, including geography, anthropology, small islands: Towards effective and political science, psychology, and philosophy. The contributions to the sustainable adaptation? volume focus on political and financial difficulties of climate change governance; highlight the importance of cultural values, local knowledge and perceptions in and for adaptation; and question to what extent mobility and migration constitute sustainable adaptation. Overall, the contributions highlight the diversity of island contexts, but also their specific challenges; they present valuable lessons for both adaptation success and failure, and emphasise island resilience and agency in the face of climate change. Dealing with climate change on small islands: Towards effective and sustainable adaptation? Klöck/Fink (eds.) ISBN: 978-3-86395-435-2 Göttingen University Press Göttingen University Press Carola Klöck, Michael Fink (eds.) Dealing with climate change on small islands: Towards effective and sustainable adaptation? This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Published by Göttingen University Press 2019 Carola Klöck Michael Fink (eds.) Dealing with climate change on small islands: Towards effective and sustainable adaptation? Göttingen University Press 2019 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de With financial support by Volkswagen Foundation and the Center for International Studies (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris. Address of the editors Carola Klöck Email: [email protected] Michael Fink Email: [email protected] This work is protected by German Intellectual Property Right Law. It is also available as an Open Access version through the publisher’s homepage and the Göttingen University Catalogue (GUK) at the Göttingen State and University Library (http://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de). The license terms of the online version apply. Setting and layout: Caitlin Gordon-Walker, Michael Fink and Carola Klöck Cover design: Jutta Pabst Cover picture: Michael Fink: Mangroves planted on the shore of Suva, Fiji © 2019 Göttingen University Press http://univerlag.uni-goettingen.de ISBN: 978-3-86395-435-2 DOI: https://doi.org/10.17875/gup2019-1208 Table of contents Contributing authors ix 1 Dealing with climate change on small islands: Towards 1 effective and sustainable adaptation? Carola Klöck and Michael Fink PART I: GOVERNING AND FUNDING LONG-TERM ADAPTATION 2 Failing adaptation in island contexts: The growing need 19 for transformational change Patrick D. Nunn and Karen E. McNamara 3 Contrasting potential for nature-based solutions to 45 enhance coastal protection services in atoll islands Virginie K. E. Duvat and Alexandre K. Magnan 4 Distributing scarce adaptation finance across SIDS: 77 Effectiveness, not efficiency Christian Baatz and Michel Bourban 5 Sustainable development and climate change adaptation: 101 Goal interlinkages and the case of SIDS Michelle Scobie vi Table of contents 6 Adaptation planning in Caribbean Small Island Developing States: A literature review 123 Adelle Thomas PART II: CULTURES, PERCEPTIONS, AND KNOWLEDGES 7 Comparing perceptions of climate-related environmental changes for Tuvalu, Samoa, and Tonga 143 Katharina Beyerl, Harald A. Mieg, and Eberhard H. Weber 8 From apathy to agency: Exploring religious responses to climate change in the Pacific Island region 175 Hannah Fair 9 Climate change and livelihood practices in Vanuatu 195 Desirée Hetzel and Arno Pascht 10 Extreme weather events in Small Island Developing States: Barriers to climate change adaptation among . coastal communities in a remote island of Fiji 217 Stefano Moncada and Hilary Bambrick PART III: MIGRATION AND (IM-)MOBILITY 11 Climate change displacement: Towards ontological security 251 Carol Farbotko 12 Moving to dangerous places 267 Eberhard H. Weber, Priya Kissoon, and Camari Koto 13 Adaptation and the question of migration: Directions in dealing with climate change in Kiribati 293 Elfriede Hermann and Wolfgang Kempf 14 Climate-induced migration in Lotofaga village in Samoa 313 Ximena Flores-Palacios Acknowledgements This book is truly a collective piece of work. It is the result of the collective efforts of many people, and we are truly grateful for the continuous support and fruitful exchange with the many colleagues and people that were involved in the book’s creation in one stage or another. We very much enjoyed working with everyone involved, and learnt a great deal in the process of making this volume. The book has its origin in a symposium with the same title – “Dealing with Climate Change on Small Islands – Towards Effective and Sustainable Adapta- tion?”. The symposium brought together over 30 scholars and practitioners work- ing in and on small islands across the world’s oceans. Over three days, we dis- cussed the challenges and specificities, but also achievements and lessons learnt, of climate change adaptation in small island contexts. The symposium was held in Hannover, Germany, in July 2018, with financial and logistical support of the Volkswagen Foundation. We are grateful for the financial support from the Volkswagen Foundation that made the workshop – and hence the present volume – possible in the first place. In particular, we are indebted to Anke Harwardt-Feye for her invaluable help in organising the symposium. Hellena Debelts and Kerstin Gebhardt from the University of Göttingen also were essential to making the meeting a success. They managed all logistical and organisational aspects of the workshop. Last, but certainly not least, we would like to thank all workshop partic- ipants for the fruitful, intense and enjoyable discussions and exchange in Hannover – and for pushing us to publish the workshop contributions in an edited volume. The contributions to this edited volume originated from presentations at the Hannover workshop, and then were written, re-written, revised and improved for publication. We would first like to thank the contributing authors, who were very patient and supportive over the past year, and who revised their chapters multiple times. We would also like to thank all reviewers who read and commented earlier versions of the chapters. Each chapter underwent a single-blind peer review pro- viii Acknowledgements cess, whereby two experts, including both workshop participants and external ex- perts, provided an overall evaluation and helpful suggestions for improvement. Valuable suggestions for improvements also came from Caitlin Gordon- Walker, our copy editor. She read through the entire book and carefully edited each chapter for language, style and clarity. We are extremely grateful for her pro- fessional support. We would also like to acknowledge the financial resources pro- vided by the Center for International Studies at Sciences Po Paris that allowed us to rely on a professional copy editor. Finally, the production team at Göttingen University Press and in particular Jutta Pabst accompanied the production of this book from an early stage and helped see the manuscript through to publication. Paris and Göttingen, 15 October 2019 Carola Klöck and Michael Fink Contributing authors Christian Baatz is assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy at Kiel University and postdoctoral researcher in the Cluster of Excellence ‘The Future Ocean’ where he leads a research project on how to fairly prioritize international adaptation finance. He is also working on a monograph on compensating climate change victims in developing countries. Beyond climate change, his research inter- ests include moral, justice and human rights theory, environmental ethics as well as conceptions of sustainable development. Hilary Bambrick is an environmental epidemiologist and bioanthropologist re- searching the health impacts of climate change, including adaptation at all scales from small communities to national systems. She has worked in Australia, the Pa- cific, Asia and Africa, and is a strong advocate for rapid transition from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy. She currently is Professor and Head of the School of Public Health and Social Work at Queensland University of Technology. Katharina Beyerl is a psychologist with a focus on environmental psychology. She holds a PhD in geography from Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (Germany), and has been working at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany since 2012. She studies perceptions of the socio-ecological crisis and coping strategies in order to support a transition to more sustainable lifestyles. Michel Bourban is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in philosophy and envi- ronmental ethics at Kiel University. He is working on a project focusing on the allocation of adaptation finance in SIDS from a climate justice perspective. He holds a PhD in Philosophy
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