title: Can Perceptions of Environmental and Climate Change in Island Communities Assist in Adaptation Planning Locally?
abstract: Local perceptions of environmental and climate change, as well as associated adaptations made by local populations, are fundamental for designing comprehensive and inclusive mitigation and adaptation plans both locally and nationally. In this paper, we analyze people's perceptions of environmental and climate-related transformations in communities across the Western Solomon Islands through ethnographic and geospatial methods. Specifically, we documented people's observed changes over the past decades across various environmental domains, and for each change, we asked respondents to identify the causes, timing, and people's adaptive responses. We also incorporated this information into a geographical information system database to produce broad-scale base maps of local perceptions of environmental change. Results suggest that people detected changes that tended to be acute (e.g., water clarity, logging intensity, and agricultural diseases). We inferred from these results that most local observations of and adaptations to change were related to parts of environment/ecosystem that are most directly or indirectly related to harvesting strategies. On the other hand, people were less aware of slower insidious/chronic changes identified by scientific studies. For the Solomon Islands and similar contexts in the insular tropics, a broader anticipatory adaptation planning strategy to climate change should include a mix of local scientific studies and local observations of ongoing ecological changes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology and Department of Ichthyology and Fisheries Science (DIFS), Rhodes University, Grahamstown, 6140, South Africa. s.aswani@ru.ac.za.
authors.forename: Shankar
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Aswani
authors.affiliation: Department of Anthropology, McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
authors.forename: Ismael
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Vaccaro
authors.affiliation: Environment and Sustainability Institute, University of Exeter, Penryn, Cornwall, TR10 9EZ, UK.
authors.forename: Kirsten
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Abernethy
authors.affiliation: School of Civil Engineering, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 4072, Australia.
authors.forename: Simon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Albert
authors.affiliation: Institut Català de Paleoecologia Humana i Evolució Social (IPHES), Área de Prehistoria Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain.
authors.forename: Javier Fernández-López
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: de Pablo
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture / Q000379:methods*; D002980:Climate; D057231:Climate Change; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D062312:Islands; D008542:Melanesia; D010465:Perception
keywords: Adaptation planning; Climate and environmental change; Local knowledge; Perceptions; Solomon Islands