Patrick Nunn

University of the Sunshine Coast | USC · Faculty of Arts, Business and Law

Oral traditions describing details of ancient volcanic eruptions and their effects survive throughout the inhabited world. Many such eruptions, especially those having catastrophic environmental and societal consequences, proved sufficiently memorable to form the basis of enduring oral traditions. Using global databases, we identified 2306 such eru...

It has long been recognized that the Pacific Small Island Developing States are highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, emphasizing the urgency with which adaptation planning and efforts need to be realized. History supports the resiliency of Pacific peoples, though a number of challenges to adaptive capacity have been noted in the prev...

The impacts of climate change are particularly strong in Pacific Small Island Developing States. However, empirical data on mental health and well-being in the context of climate change and climate anxiety in the region remains limited. The aim of this research was to understand the emotional experiences of climate change and its impact on well-bei...

There is a paucity of research that examines the relationship between spirituality and sustainable development, including in relation to Indigenous or non-Western worldviews. This Comment argues that closer integration of spirituality and sustainability will enable more effective and sustainable strategies for future development.

Islandness is a contested concept, not just between disciplines but also cultures, entangled with what islands, island studies, and island identity are understood to be. The purpose of this article is to explore some of these different meanings, without necessarily unifying or reconciling them, with the aim of keeping multiple understandings of isl...

While different in emphasis, spirituality and sustainable development are intertwined concepts that cannot be meaningfully discussed in isolation from each other. This is especially pertinent in Pacific Island countries that are characterised by both high degrees of vulnerability to climate change and high degrees of religious engagement. There is...

Islands are at the center of discourses on climate change. Yet despite extensive work on diverse island systems in a changing climate, we still lack an understanding of climate change-related responses amongst islands and what shifting from what might be called “tinkering” (perhaps heat warnings) to “transformational” adaptation (perhaps relocation...

Coastal erosion occurs along many of the world’s shorelines, but is of particular concern to small islands. In response, island shorelines are often armoured through engineered structures such as seawalls, rip-raps, dikes or similar. Such hard protection is rarely successful in island contexts; rather than stop erosion, hard protection often simply...

Climate change has compounding effects on development, including direct and indirect impacts on food systems and human health. In the Pacific Islands region, the incidence of non-communicable diseases is among the highest in the world. Additionally, in policy documents, climate change features prominently among the issues most responsible for hinde...

In the aftermath of the last ice age, when sea level rose along most of the world's coastline, the activities of coastal peoples were impacted by coastal submergence, land loss and sometimes isolation as offshore islands formed. In some parts of the world, there is clear evidence that people encoded their observations of postglacial sea-level rise...

In many long-enduring coastal cultures, there are stories sometimes mythologized – about times when pieces of land became separated from mainlands by submergence, a process that created islands where none existed before. Using examples from northwest Europe and Australia, this paper argues that many such stories recall times, often millennia ago,...

The compounding effects of climate change on food systems have led researchers into developing approaches aimed at understanding the multiple trade-offs and synergies associated to dealing with climate change. As countries continue to develop climate policies, in particular adaptation strategies, it is evident that these need to be articulated more...

Water scarcity is a global challenge, yet existing responses are failing to cope with current shocks and stressors, including those attributable to climate change. In sub-Saharan Africa, the impacts of water scarcity threaten livelihoods and wellbeing across the continent and are driving a broad range of adaptive responses. This paper describes tre...

The attainment of sustainable development in many contexts remains challenging. In rural/peripheral parts of many developing countries, the situation is exacerbated by globalization. Using an example from Vanuatu (South West Bay, Malakula Island), this study explains how Government policy around sustainable development is disseminated and the impac...

The need for Asia-Pacific coastal cities to adapt effectively and sustainably to accelerating (relative) sea-level rise is growing. If such adaptation does not occur in a timely manner, then it could result in socio-economic problems that will reverberate throughout the region. Using examples of coastal Asia-Pacific cities that are characterised by...

Petrographic analyses of sand tempers in Pacific Island potsherds reveal information about ancient human interactions within archipelagic contexts. By comparison with bedrock mineralogy, analyses of 45 sherds from the Lapita settlement at Naitabale on Moturiki Island (central Fiji) show that most sherds were manufactured locally but that a minority...

Owing to their high shoreline-to-land-area ratios, islands are especially sensitive to coastal change and their inhabitants especially vulnerable to associated impacts. In places along island coasts where shoreline recession is particularly noticeable and/or its impacts most severe, perhaps because adjacent population densities are unusually high,...

Most climate-change adaptation in the Pacific Islands has been framed in secular terms yet applied in contexts where routine decision-making is spiritually informed. This may be a major reason why such externally-sponsored adaptation has met with very limited success to date. This highlights an opportunity for reframing adaptation in ways that are...

This interdisciplinary book explores the science and spirituality nexus in the Pacific Islands Region and as such makes a critical contribution to sustainable climate change adaptation in Oceania. In addition to presenting case studies, literary analyses, field projects, and empirical research, the book describes faith-engaged approaches through th...

Given that almost every Pacific Island resident is spiritually engaged to a degree that is uncommon in western secular societies, an evaluation of the role of religion in climate-change adaptation in this exposed region is overdue. This chapter explains the nature of Pacific Island people’s religious engagement, its undoubted links with culturally-...

Peripheral communities across the Pacific are progressively being recognized as priority areas for the implementation of climate change adaptation strategies. A key step in planning and implementing effective adaptation actions is to identify what elements are driving vulnerability and resilience. Building on existing vulnerability and resilience c...

Over the past few decades, attempts at adaptation to climate change (current and future) in the Pacific Islands have largely failed to be either effective or sustained. Among the many reasons for this failure may be that most adaptation strategies have been designed and driven by outsiders rather than by persons familiar with island contexts and di...

Recent assessments of future risk to atoll habitability have focused on island erosion and submergence, and have overlooked the effects of other climate‐related drivers, as well as differences between ocean basins and island types. Here we investigate the cumulative risk arising from multiple drivers (sea‐level rise; changes in rainfall, ocean–atmo...

Planned climate change adaptation initiatives are being developed with both external and endogenous resources at an increasing rate, especially in developing countries. As climate change continues to pose risks to vulnerable communities, there is a growing need to identify lessons learned in the process of planning and implementing climate change a...

Background: Pacific Small Island Developing States (SIDS) have health care systems with a limited capacity to deal with pandemics, making them especially vulnerable to the economic and social impacts of the coronavirus (COVID-19). This paper examines the introduction, transmission, and incidence of COVID-19 into Pacific SIDS. Methods: Calculate...

For the Pacific Islands, community-based adaptation activities are crucial, and yet it remains uncertain whether they are effectively promoting long-term adaptive capacity. Here we evaluate the performance of 32 community-based adaptation initiatives across 20 rural communities in the Pacific. We find that initiative appropriateness was a strength...

Livelihood challenges from future climate change confront coastal high-island communities in the Pacific; most are currently inadequately prepared. The sustained inability of external funding to bring about appropriate change, especially in rural communities, is well documented. As the situation, forced largely by accelerating sea-level rise, becom...

Communities across the Pacific are being challenged by the impacts of climate change. Attaining food and nutrition security goals is also a priority for the region, particularly in relation to improving dietary quality and reducing the incidence of non-communicable diseases. Addressing these challenges requires context-specific research that incorp...

As concern about sea level rise grows and optimal solutions are sought to address its causes and effects, little attention has been given to past analogs. This article argues that valuable insights into contemporary discussions about future sea level rise can be gained from understanding those of the past, specifically the ways in which coastal peo...

Pacific Island Countries, despite significant variation in levels of exposure and internal adaptive capacities, are often portrayed homogenously as the world’s most vulnerable region to climate change. As such over the past few decades, a plethora of projects intended to assist communities across the region adapt to future climate change have been...

Coastal communities in Pacific Island Countries are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts including sea-level rise, coastal erosion, tidal inundation, and the intensification of storm surge activity. In response, adaptation projects across the region have attempted to reduce exposure and overall vulnerability to these coastal pressures....

The Pacific Islands region is highlighted in the literature as one of the most vulnerable geographic areas in the world, with a high priority for adaptation to climate change. In consequence, many interventions have been proposed and implemented over the years that approach environmental sustainability and adaptation to climate change in the Pacifi...

Global concerns for Pacific Island Countries under a new climate regime and increasing development challenges has prompted many external agencies to intervene with climate change adaptation programs. Despite extensive funding and efforts, many external interventions tend to overlook the importance of Indigenous and local knowledge, and working in p...

A 50–70 cm sea-level fall around A.D. 1300 may have led to a prolonged food crisis which caused conflict among coastal dwellers on high Pacific islands. The conflict may have necessitated abandoning difficult to defend coastal settlements and establishing ones in fortifiable locations inland. To test this idea, abandoned hillforts (koronivalu)on20k...

Oceanic islands have a history of being misunderstood by outsiders, commonly marginalized in global synthesis and planning, their considerable diversity often understated. To capture and explain the diversity of islands in the Pacific, a classification is developing using elevation and lithology (rock type) as the highest level criteria. For each o...

Assessment of Pacific island vulnerability to changing climate and ocean conditions was undertaken at two scales, demonstrating a technique for vulnerability downscaling and establishing the suitability of coastal landform information to application at country or island scale. The approach acknowledges the transition of physical characteristics inf...

Climate change has been recognized as one of the most critical and controversial issues facing the world in the twenty-first century. It is predicted to lead to adverse and irreversible impacts on the earth and ecosystems as a whole. This chapter discusses the causes of climate change and current and potential impacts that will affect the people no...

Over the past few decades, attempts at adaptation to climate change (current and future) in the Pacific Islands have largely failed to be either effective or sustained. Among the many reasons for this failure may be that most adaptation strategies have been designed and driven by outsiders rather than by persons familiar with island contexts and di...

This chapter details an objective method of developing an index of island susceptibility to climate change. Three separate indices are developed to estimate the potential of an island to physical change in response to likely climatic changes. These are indicative susceptibility, exposure index and geomorphic susceptibility. To develop the indicativ...

Recent assessments of future risk to atoll habitability have focused on island erosion and submergence, and have overlooked the effects of other climate-related drivers, as well as differences between ocean basins and island types. Here we investigate the cumulative risk arising from multiple drivers (sea-level rise; changes in rainfall, ocean-atmo...

A study of various defining aspects of 11 rural communities along the cross-island road on Viti Levu (Fiji) shows diversity attributable largely to their peripherality, proxied by distance along this 200-km long road. Strong relationships are found between peripherality and both community size and the dependency ratio (percent of young/old dependen...

The resettlement of communities has occurred throughout time from a variety of drivers. More recently, relocation from climate change impacts has emerged in policy frameworks and on-the-ground initiatives. While there are few case studies of climate-induced relocation globally, this is expected to increase in the future. Exploring the livelihood im...

This study sought to understand why/when sand islands formed off the north coast of Viti Levu Island (Fiji), how they subsequently developed, and what is likely to happen to them in future. During fieldwork in 2010 and 2016, six groups of sand islands were mapped and their sub-surface stratigraphy analysed; radiocarbon ages were obtained for 16 sam...

The Green Climate Fund, donors, governments and non-governmental organisations, among others, are pouring vast amounts of financial and human capital into community-based adaptation across the developing world. The underlying premise is that the world’s majority—who have the minority of financial capital—are living on the margins and are the most v...

Many developing countries are dependent upon richer countries for underwriting costs of climate-change adaptation. This is unsustainable: as the costs of adaptation in richer countries escalate, the willingness to allocate funds to developing countries is likely to decrease. Although unpalatable, developing countries should consider returning to ti...

In many Pacific Island Countries, mangroves deliver ecosystem goods and services that are essential to the livelihoods of local people. For coastal and rural communities throughout Fiji, it is common for women to be the main caretakers of mangroves, and to access and utilise their resources on a regular basis. This paper explores local perspectives...

Over the past thirty years, externally-driven interventions for climate-change adaptation in rural Pacific Island contexts have largely failed to be effective or sustained. One reason is that traditional (culturally-grounded) autonomous community coping capacity has been overlooked, many external agencies viewing all such communities as both homoge...

Sixteen hillforts constructed and occupied perhaps several centuries before contact in the early nineteenth century are described from Bua district in northern Fiji. These hillforts represent inland settlements in fortifiable locations on high volcanic islands, plausibly established in response to the outbreak of sustained conflict. The chronology...

Community-based adaptation has gained significant international attention as a way for communities to respond to the increasing threats and complex pressures posed by climate change. This bottom-up strategy represents an alternative to the prolonged reliance on, and widespread ineffectiveness of, mitigation methods to halt climate change, in additi...

High levels of vulnerability to climate change impacts are rendering some places uninhabitable. In Fiji, four communities have already initiated or completed the task of moving their homes and livelihoods to less exposed locations, with numerous more communities earmarked for future relocation. This paper documents people’s lived experiences in two...

Ancient stories recalling catastrophic events were developed, sometimes encoded in myth, and passed down across several millennia in largely oral contexts. Volcanism is well suited to such stories and there are examples of extant stories recalling eruptions that occurred several millennia ago. This study focuses on a subset of these stories—those t...

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) share a common vulnerability to climate change. Adaptation to climate change and variability is urgently needed yet, while some is already occurring in SIDS, research on the nature and efficacy of adaptation across SIDS is fragmentary. In this article, we systematically review academic literature to identify wh...

Across the Global South, community-based adaptation (CBA) projects are increasingly being implemented in an effort to respond effectively and sustainably to the impacts of climate change, with a particular focus on people’s livelihoods. Despite an increase in the number of CBA projects being implemented, detailed analysis and evaluation of their ef...

Ancient stories recalling memorable events can be demonstrated as enduring in recognizable form in oral (non-literate or pre-literate) cultures for several millennia. As explained in the author’s 2018 book, The Edge of Memory (Bloomsbury, London), some of the most compelling of these stories are those recalling coastal ‘drowning’, interpreted in mo...

1. a) The researched topic Climate change poses massive and varied challenges to the ways in which people live throughout the Asia-Pacific region. And despite the earnest requests of many of its most vulnerable peoples, emissions of greenhouse gases over the past few decades have made many climate-change impacts unavoidable, whatever action the wor...

In today's society it is generally the written word that holds the authority. We are more likely to trust the words found in a history textbook over the version of history retold by a friend – after all, human memory is unreliable, and how can you be sure your friend hasn't embellished the facts? But before humans were writing down their knowledge,...

An objective method is proposed to evaluate the susceptibility of islands to climate change. As used here, susceptibility is an estimate of the potential for physical change of an island coast in response to likely changes in climate–ocean boundary conditions. The evaluation is based on an assumption that the intensity of impact due to climate and...

Island societies are being disproportionately affected by climate change, a situation likely to continue for some decades. Using an example of an island affected by multiple climate-linked stressors, a situation likely to become more common in the future, this paper examines the nature of these, the ways they are perceived and responded to by local...

This book examines the multiple strategies proposed by the international community for addressing global climate change (GCC) from both human and state-security perspectives. It examines what is needed from major states working within the UN framework to engage with the multiple dimensions of a strategy that addresses GCC and its impacts, where suc...

Those parts of the northwest Pacific Ocean where sea level has been rising fastest over the past few decades include islands in the Federated States of Micronesia. To understand the possible effects of rapid sea-level rise, coastal surveys were undertaken within Pohnpei State in October 2014. The high volcanic island of Pohnpei was targeted along w...

Purpose Climate change poses diverse, often fundamental, challenges to livelihoods of island peoples. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate that these challenges must be better understood before effective and sustainable adaptation is possible. Design/methodology/approach Understanding past livelihood impacts from climate change can help d...

The characterization of Pacific Islands as especially vulnerable to climate change often undervalues the cultural resilience of their inhabitants. On many Micronesian islands, coastal stone-built structures are the most visible type of tangible cultural resilience and have endured for perhaps 1000 years or more. A distinction is recognized between...

The experience of environmental stress and attitudes towards climate change was explored for 1226 students at the University of the South Pacific, the foremost tertiary institution serving the independent nations of the Pacific. Students sourced information regarding climate change from media including television, radio, and newspapers; the communi...

For a generation, governments around the world have been committed to sustainable development as a policy goal. This has been supported by an array of new policies ranging from international agreements, to national strategies, environmental laws at many levels of government, regional programs, and local plans. Despite these efforts, decades of scie...

An earth-science-based classification of islands within the Pacific Basin resulted from the preparation of a database describing the location, area, and type of 1779 islands, where island type is determined as a function of the prevailing lithology and maximum elevation of each island, with an island defined as a discrete landmass composed of a con...

Like some other oral traditions of Australian Aborigines, those that relate to widespread and enduring coastal inundation appear to be several thousand years old. The best-documented traditions, some mythologised, are presented for six sites around the Australian coast (Bathurst and Melville Islands, Northern Territory; Rottnest, Carnac and Garden...