Patrick Nunn

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

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,...

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-...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In this study we employed the Extended Parallel Process Model of risk communication to investigate the effectiveness of combining threat and efficacy messages to increase public engagement with climate change. A total of 515 Mandarin-speaking residents of Beijing, China were randomly assigned to view one of two climate change messages sourced from...

A sample of 1226 students at the University of the South Pacific, the premier tertiary institution in the Pacific Islands, answered a range of questions intended to understand future island decision-makers’ attitudes towards Nature and concern about climate change. Questions asking about church attendance show that the vast majority of participants...

In the interests of improving engagement with Pacific Island communities to enable development of effective and sustainable adaptation strategies to climate change, we looked at how traditional oral narratives in rural/peripheral Fiji communities might be used to inform such strategies. Interviews were undertaken and observations made in 27 communi...

A reassessment is made of the model of Dickinson (2003, Journal of Coastal Research), which proposed that many Pacific island coasts were settled only after the palaeoreef flats or shore platforms that formed during the mid-Holocene sea-level highstand emerged above high-tide level: a point in time known as the crossover date. Focusing on reef (ato...

Objectives: Bourewa, on the southwest coast of Viti Levu in Fiji, is a multi-period site that contained burials dated to the later Vuda Phase (750-150 BP), a period of climatic fluctuations that potentially impacted the availability of food resources. We aim to investigate diet and movement at this site during a time of possible ecological pressur...

Some stories belonging to Australian Aboriginal groups tell of a time when the former coastline of mainland Australia was inundated by rising sea level. Stories are presented from 21 locations from every part of this coastline. In most instances it is plausible to assume that these stories refer to events that occurred more than about 7000 years ag...

Societies that develop on islands in oceans, distant from continental shores and one another, are unusually vulnerable to fundamental change (collapse). It is argued that a common cause of such change is the effect of external (climate-driven) environmental forcing on food resources, especially those on which coastal-dwelling island peoples invaria...

During the warmest time of the last 10 000 years (Holocene Thermal Maximum), approximately 6000–4000 cal yr BP in the western Pacific, sea level is known to have reached as much as 2.1 m above its present mean level before declining subsequently. Records throughout the region show that sea level fell an average 0.7 m in the period 3500–2000 cal yr...

Given the unquestioned impacts of recent/future environmental changes on human societies, it is reasonable to posit that past societal responses could be used as proxies of contemporaneous environmental forcing and might help identify the drivers of these, particularly where independent evidence of the effects of these events is inadequate. Such ar...

http://www.ifrc.org/publications-and-reports/world-disasters-report/world-disasters-report-2014/

Engaging the public about mitigating or adapting to climate change threats poses significant challenges for scientists, policy makers, and others responsible for developing communication strategies. In response to these challenges, interest is growing in audience segmentation as a possible strategy to develop more effective communications that are...

Rapid coastal change is common in the Asia-Pacific region yet an understanding of its causes, recurrence times, and impacts is not always clear through the use of conventional geological methods. It is suggested that myths (traditional [oral] tales) are underutilized sources of information about coastal change in this region. This is illustrated by...

Although the Fiji Islands have been settled for more than 3000 years, the prehistoric settlement history of the 750-km2 Bā River Valley in northern Viti Levu Island is largely unknown. Investigations of two former upland settlement sites (Tubabaka and Vatusōsoso) in defensive locations, more than 10 km from the coast, and occupied perhaps AD 1250–1...

The critical analysis of myths (traditional oral tales) can lead to an improved understanding of geohazards. This paper examines three groups of myths (volcano, earthquake, coastal change) from Asia-Pacific cultures and shows how their analysis can contribute to the identification of unrealised geohazards in particular places as well as the magnitu...

Fortified upland sites dating from the last millennium are found on many Pacific islands, but few such sites have been described in detail. The results of the excavation of an unusually large, multi-unit stone-walled fortification (Vatutāqiri) located on the Vatia Peninsula, northern Viti Levu Island, Fiji are presented here. The current study repr...

In his News and Analysis piece reporting on the newly released fifth assessment report (AR5) by Working Group I (WGI) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (“A Stronger IPCC Report,” 4 October, p. [23][1]), R. A. Kerr highlights three fundamental conclusions about climate

ISI Document Delivery No.: 274ZI Times Cited: 0 Cited Reference Count: 0 Church, John A. Clark, Peter U. Cazenave, Anny Gregory, Jonathan M. Jevrejeva, Svetlana Levermann, Anders Merrifield, Mark A. Milne, Glenn A. Nerem, R. Steven Nunn, Patrick D. Payne, Antony J. Pfeffer, W. Tad Stammer, Detlef Unnikrishnan, Alakkat S. payne, antony/A-8916-2008;...

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 t...

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...

Seven Lapita sites on the Rove Peninsula of Viti Levu in Fiji or on islets close offshore include the earliest known Lapita site in Fiji at Bourewa. Petrographic study of 53 Rove sherds shows that 95 per cent contain closely related hybrid temper sands (mixed terrigenous and calcareous grains) collected locally from the shores of the ancestral Tuva...

Two upland sites from the Vatia Peninsula, northern Viti Levu Island, Fiji, were excavated as part of a larger project investigating the settlement history of this area. These sites represent the first intensive survey and excavation program in this part of Fiji. The sites are a cave (Matanigaga), which acted as a short-term shelter, and a ring-wal...

This research aimed to provide practical information about how to design communications on climate change adaptation and target these to the Australian population. This was achieved by: (1) identifying and increasing awareness of different climate change audiences in Australia, and (2) evaluating how each audience responds to different types of cli...

This chapter considers changes in global mean sea level, regional sea level, sea level extremes, and waves. Confidence in projections of globalmean sea level rise has increased since the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) because of the improved physical understanding of the components of sea level, the improved agreement of process-based models with o...

Despite reaching heights of >6 m and destroying a sizeable coastal settlement at the head of Baie Martelli (Pentecost Island, Vanuatu, South Pacific), the 26th November 1999 tsunamis caused only five fatalities from a threatened population of about 300 persons, most of whom fled inland and upslope before the waves struck. This remarkable survival r...

This paper reports preliminary findings of a study in northern Viti Levu Island (Fiji) intended to test the model of the AD 1300 Event. This holds that around AD 1250-1350, during the transition between the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, there was a rapid climate-driven sea-level fall of 70-80 cm which created a food crisis for coasta...

Two upland sites from the Vatia Peninsula, northern Viti Levu Island, Fiji, were excavated as part of a larger project investigating the settlement history of this area. These sites represent the first intensive survey and excavation program in this part of Fiji. The sites are a cave (Matanigaga),which acted as a short-term shelter, and a ring-wall...

During the last millennium in the Pacific Basin (islands and continental rim) there was a marked contrast between ‘times of plenty’ and ‘times of less’ for its human societies. This contrast is attributable to climate and sea-level variations, notably the Medieval Warm Period (a.d. 700–1250) and the Little Ice Age (a.d. 1350–1800) separated by a ti...

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...

Sea-level changesPast sea-level changesHolocene sea-level changesProjecting twenty-first-century sea-level riseAdapting to sea-level riseConclusion Further reading

At the Lapita-era (1100-550 BC) settlements (Bourewa and Qoqo) along the Rove Peninsula in Fiji, valves of the reef-surface-dwelling giant clam Hippopus hippopus (long extirpated in Fiji) occur in shell midden. Valve size/weight increase with depth, suggesting that human predation contributed to its local disappearance. The timing of this event is...

We have carried out a thorough mineralogical analysis of 16 pottery samples from the Lapita site of Bourwera in Fiji, using micromorphological techniques with optical and polarising microscopes. While the overall mineralogy of all of the samples is similar the samples clearly divide into two groups, namely those with or without the mineral calcite....

Future climate change poses a set of fundamental challenges to livelihoods in the Pacific Islands region. During their more than 3000-year occupation of these islands, people have developed an understanding of their natural environments, their production potential and their vulnerabilities, and the variations in these through time as forced by clim...

Many Pacific Island myths are euhemeristic, based on historical events. Two types of relevance to reconstructions of geological events are described here. Myths from the Pacific describing how islands were fished up are widespread. Most contain details that refer to the fish-island thrashing and agitating the ocean water as it emerges, details that...