Rediscovering the past to negotiate the future: How knowledge about settlement history on high tropical Pacific Islands might facilitate future relocations

Abstract

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, becomes more exigent, so effective and sustainable adaptation in such places is becoming an increasing priority.This study proposes that rather than preferencing science, something that leaders in many such communities value little, adaptive strategies should engage with community histories that have often been kept alive in such places by oral traditions (and other means) passed across many generations. On high Pacific islands, many people in pre-colonial times occupied inland places where their exposure to coastal change (and environmental shocks more generally) was negligible. For ease of accessibility and control, most Pacific communities were relocated to the coasts early in colonial times, establishing an orthodoxy of coastal living that prevailed after independence and today underpins the reluctance of many coastal dwellers to contemplate landward relocation.Understanding how people in this region lived in the (distant) past helps today's coastal peoples contextualize imperatives for relocation, both within and between islands. Together with developing adaptive strategies that are driven by communities rather than by outsiders (people without long-term vested interests in particular places), this seems likely to provide a blueprint for successful future relocations in the Pacific Islands, one in which there are specific roles for communities, governments and their international partners.