1 Beyond Belief
3
the highest in the world; over the past five decades, the ocean surface in Micronesia
and Solomon Islands has risen 4–5 times faster than the global average (currently
3.2 mm/year) causing massive impacts along island coasts and even the disappearance
of entire (low sandy) islands (Albert et al. 2016; Becker et al. 2012; Nunn et al. 2017).
And in the background, the steady rise in temperature is impacting crop growth,
stressing familiar ecosystems, and forcing changes to farming practices (McGree
et al. 2019; Taylor et al. 2016; Luetz and Havea 2018).
While global onlookers understandably rationalize such occurrences through a
secular scientific lens, most people living on Pacific Islands view them quite differently, privileging Pacific worldviews and seeking spiritual-religious explanations for
the causes of these occurrences and, most importantly, spiritually-framed guidance
as to how best to respond to them (Cox et al. 2018; Luetz and Nunn 2020).
This is not a trivial issue. For if you seek to bring about behaviour change
(like appropriate climate-change adaptation) in communities whose members have
a different worldview to your own, then you will not achieve your goal by simply
insisting that you are correct—and they, by implication, are wrong. Of course, you
may be cut a bit of slack if your insistence that you are correct is accompanied by
a sizeable wad of cash but eventually such communities will fall back on their own
beliefs, their time-honoured ways of rationalizing and coping with change. For such
reasons, huge amounts of adaptation funding given by well-intentioned outside agencies to Pacific Island nations over the past few decades have failed to bring about
any effective or sustainable adaptation, especially at community level (Nunn and
McNamara 2019).
It is often claimed that Pacific Island peoples and communities lack resilience to
external livelihood stressors like climate change but that is a superficial judgement
which disregards the fact that people have lived on Pacific Islands for hundreds if not
thousands of years.
3 How could this have happened if they (and the societies of which
they were part) were not extraordinarily resilient? The issue is that ‘resilience’ as
defined at a global level for the specific purpose of identifying climate-change adaptation needs has, when scaled down, little relevance in many non-western contexts
since it sidelines their culturally-grounded resilience.
For outsiders to help achieve effective and sustainable adaptation to climate change
in non-western contexts, it is essential to meaningfully engage with the worldviews of
target communities. This is a preliminary to having them ‘own’ the issue of climatechange adaptation rather then consider it “a foreign construct, a preoccupation of
developed nations” (Nunn 2009, p. 213). But it is now clear that outsiders need to
go further than has been usual in the past and allow these communities to design
and drive adaptive solutions along pathways that are familiar to them (particularly
in terms of languages and cultural protocols). Into these pathways, the insights from
western science needed to fine-tune these solutions should be inserted in as ethical
3 The earliest-known colonization of oceanic islands in the Pacific is that of the Mariana Islands
(northwest Pacific), plausibly from Luzon (Philippines), about 3500 years ago, a journey that
involved an open-ocean crossing of at least 2300 km (almost 1500 miles) (Hung et al. 2011).
3
the highest in the world; over the past five decades, the ocean surface in Micronesia
and Solomon Islands has risen 4–5 times faster than the global average (currently
3.2 mm/year) causing massive impacts along island coasts and even the disappearance
of entire (low sandy) islands (Albert et al. 2016; Becker et al. 2012; Nunn et al. 2017).
And in the background, the steady rise in temperature is impacting crop growth,
stressing familiar ecosystems, and forcing changes to farming practices (McGree
et al. 2019; Taylor et al. 2016; Luetz and Havea 2018).
While global onlookers understandably rationalize such occurrences through a
secular scientific lens, most people living on Pacific Islands view them quite differently, privileging Pacific worldviews and seeking spiritual-religious explanations for
the causes of these occurrences and, most importantly, spiritually-framed guidance
as to how best to respond to them (Cox et al. 2018; Luetz and Nunn 2020).
This is not a trivial issue. For if you seek to bring about behaviour change
(like appropriate climate-change adaptation) in communities whose members have
a different worldview to your own, then you will not achieve your goal by simply
insisting that you are correct—and they, by implication, are wrong. Of course, you
may be cut a bit of slack if your insistence that you are correct is accompanied by
a sizeable wad of cash but eventually such communities will fall back on their own
beliefs, their time-honoured ways of rationalizing and coping with change. For such
reasons, huge amounts of adaptation funding given by well-intentioned outside agencies to Pacific Island nations over the past few decades have failed to bring about
any effective or sustainable adaptation, especially at community level (Nunn and
McNamara 2019).
It is often claimed that Pacific Island peoples and communities lack resilience to
external livelihood stressors like climate change but that is a superficial judgement
which disregards the fact that people have lived on Pacific Islands for hundreds if not
thousands of years.
3 How could this have happened if they (and the societies of which
they were part) were not extraordinarily resilient? The issue is that ‘resilience’ as
defined at a global level for the specific purpose of identifying climate-change adaptation needs has, when scaled down, little relevance in many non-western contexts
since it sidelines their culturally-grounded resilience.
For outsiders to help achieve effective and sustainable adaptation to climate change
in non-western contexts, it is essential to meaningfully engage with the worldviews of
target communities. This is a preliminary to having them ‘own’ the issue of climatechange adaptation rather then consider it “a foreign construct, a preoccupation of
developed nations” (Nunn 2009, p. 213). But it is now clear that outsiders need to
go further than has been usual in the past and allow these communities to design
and drive adaptive solutions along pathways that are familiar to them (particularly
in terms of languages and cultural protocols). Into these pathways, the insights from
western science needed to fine-tune these solutions should be inserted in as ethical
3 The earliest-known colonization of oceanic islands in the Pacific is that of the Mariana Islands
(northwest Pacific), plausibly from Luzon (Philippines), about 3500 years ago, a journey that
involved an open-ocean crossing of at least 2300 km (almost 1500 miles) (Hung et al. 2011).