Value conflicts and the politics of risk: challenges in assessing climate change impacts and risk priorities in rural Vanuatu

Abstract

Assessing risks from climate change is key for effective local adaptation planning. Integrated and participatory risk assessments are increasingly promoted as the most credible approach, ensuring community buy-in and overcoming data and resource restrictions in specific localities. Integrating the risk assessments of multiple actors can prove problematic, however, and demands attention to actors’ diverse values and politics. In this paper, I critically examine the potential for integrated risk assessments of climate change in Vanuatu, South Pacific. I focus on local communities’ risk assessments, and assessments by practitioners in civil society organizations (CSOs) that facilitate and fund local adaptation planning on climate change. I find a marked difference in how actors contextualized and prioritized risks. Villagers assessed current impacts and risks from climate change in relation to wider socio-economic changes, and prioritized maintaining their way of life. In contrast, CSO actors adopted a technocratic approach, drawing on climate science and focusing not only on the severity of risks but also on the potential need for external interventions. Explanations for climate-related changes, and notions of causality, also differed among villagers and CSO actors. These differences reveal key challenges concerning actors’ ways of knowing, conflicting values and worldviews, and the political interests influencing risk assessments. Effectively enabling integrated risk assessments will require open and inclusive dialogue among actors that creates space for alternative understandings of risk and potential adaptation strategies for climate change.

Keywords:

• climate risk
• adaptation
• participation
• small islands
• Pacific

ORCID

Ainka A. Granderson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9467-2809

Notes

1 Tide gauge and satellite data indicate interannual variations in sea levels in Vanuatu of about 18 cm (Australian Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO 2014). Sea levels and peak spring tides (King tides) tend to be higher during La Niña events, when the western Pacific Ocean is warmer, and lower in years with El Niño events.

Additional information

Funding

This work is based on Ph.D. research, which was supported by the Climate Adaptation Flagship Scholarship from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and an Australian Postgraduate Award from the University of Melbourne.