Traditional knowledge (TK) on weather and climate is an important aspect of community life in the Pacific. Used for generations, this knowledge is derived from observing biological and meteorological variables and contributes to building community resilience to weather extremes. Most of this knowledge is passed on orally and is in danger of being lost due to generational changes, leading communities to seek to preserve the knowledge in other ways. This paper provides guidance on the successful collection and documentation of weather and climate TK in the Pacific by considering four key components: the legal and national context, in-country partnerships, the role of community, and national and community protocols. At the regional level legislation focuses on the protection of culture/TK and intellectual property, which are linked to national policies and laws. Within the national context consideration of the governance structure is critical, including obtaining approvals to conduct the studies. The next consideration is developing partnerships to establish and implement the projects, including working with appropriate ministries, media, donor organizations, and community groups. Community involvement in all aspects of the projects is critical, built on trust between partners and ensuring outputs are aligned with community needs. Following community protocols and procedures allows for effective sharing of TK. We document common protocols that were piloted and tested across four Pacific Island nations, illustrating similarities and differences between cultural groups, including recognizing cultural sensitivities and ensuring custodian rights are protected.
ABSTRACT:Rainfall records for 23 countries and territories in the western Pacific have been collated for the purpose of examining trends in total and extreme rainfall since 1951. For some countries this is the first time that their data have been included in this type of analysis and for others the number of stations examined is more than twice that available in the current literature. Station trends in annual total and extreme rainfall for 1961-2011 are spatially heterogeneous and largely not statistically significant. This differs with the results of earlier studies that show spatially coherent trends that tended to reverse in the vicinity of the South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ). We infer that the difference is due to the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation switching to a negative phase from about 1999, largely reversing earlier rainfall changes. Trend analyses for 1981-2011 show wetter conditions in the West Pacific Monsoon (WPM) region and southwest of the mean SPCZ position. In the tropical North Pacific it has become wetter west of 160 • E with the Intertropical Convergence Zone/WPM expanding northwards west of 140 • E. Northeast of the SPCZ and in the central tropical Pacific east of about 160 • E it has become drier. Our findings for the South Pacific subtropics are consistent with broader trends seen in parts of southern and eastern Australia towards reduced rainfall. The relationship between total and extreme rainfall and Pacific basin sea surface temperatures (SSTs) has been investigated with a focus on the influence of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). We substantiate a strong relationship between ENSO and total rainfall and establish similar relationships for the threshold extreme indices. The percentile-based and absolute extreme indices are influenced by ENSO to a lesser extent and in some cases the influence is marginal. Undoubtedly, larger-scale SST variability is not the only influence on these indices.
Within the realm of climate and environmental sciences, stakeholder engagement has traditionally been given a relative low priority in favor of generating tools, products, and services following the longstanding practice of pushing out information in the hopes users will pull it into their decision toolkits. However, the landscape is gradually shifting away from that paradigm and toward one in which the stakeholder community is more directly involved in the production of products and services with the scientific organization. This mutual learning arrangement, referred to as the coproduction of knowledge, has been applied to two user engagement activities within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and the NOAA Office of Coastal Management (OCM) Coral Reef Conservation Program (CRCP). The iterative nature of such dialogues helped scientists within NCEI and OCM to better understand user requirements and as a result generate climate information that was locally relevant and regionally applicable. The recent engagement activities exemplified the benefits of a robust and sustained relationship between climate scientists and the user community. They demonstrate that the interactions between the two led to the empowerment of the local community to shape and mold climate information products as well as further enhancing user buy in of these products and services with which local agriculture and food security, disaster risk reduction, energy, health, and water decisions are being made. This coproduction of knowledge model for user engagement activities also serves to build trust between the scientific and user communities.
Indigenous people in Pacific Island countries (PICs) often use their knowledge of the environment, acquired through generations of holistic observational practices and experimental learning, to make meteorological forecasts. Such knowledge systems are now recognized by several institutions, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as an important participatory forecast approach for decision making, particularly at a farm level. In this article, the authors show that indigenous knowledge of weather and seasonal climate forecasting is a crucial component of a potential strategy for making farming-related decisions and reducing vulnerability to environmental hazards.
In this paper we report on the development of a new homogeneous dataset for Pacific Island station temperatures, and the variability and change that these data show. We have worked closely with meteorological services in the Pacific and East Timor to collate and rehabilitate historical climate records, incorporating homogeneity assessment and adjustment where appropriate to produce reliable analyses of temperature trends. Overall, these homogeneity adjustments create no systematic bias compared to the raw data since the early 1960s, but improve both spatial and temporal consistency at the individual station level for both variability and trends.The updated homogeneous records indicate that mean temperatures have increased at all available Pacific island stations over 1961-2010, with rates ranging from +0.04 to +0.33 ºC/decade, across the network as a whole. The strongest warming trends are found in Papua New Guinea and French Polynesia, while none of the homogeneous station records show cooling over the past 70, 50 or 30 years. Trends in maximum and minimum temperatures are very similar to those of mean temperature at most stations, apart from in Fiji, Tonga and Niue where there is a tendency for greater warming for maximum temperatures. The amount of warming in the wet and dry seasons is also similar at most stations, although stations in Fiji, Tonga and Niue display more warming during the wet season.A simple regional mean of Pacific island series shows a trend of +0.16 °C/decade over 1961-2010 and indicates that 2010 was the warmest year on record averaged across the stations available at time of analysis. This regional mean station series compares well with a regional mean series extracted from a global gridded dataset for the last 50 years. Overall, the warming in Pacific Island temperature records over the past half-century is consistent with that expected from humaninduced global warming and is large relative to natural interannual variability associated with factors such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. IntroductionInhabitants of small islands are amongst the most vulnerable to climate change, with long-term climate change posing threats to agriculture, water supplies, health, livelihoods and even the existence of small island countries (UNFCCC 2005, Mimura et al. 2007. It is therefore important to understand the range of climate variability experienced in the past to help identify potential adaptation options, as well as provide context for the interpretation of projected climate changes for the future.Recognising the vulnerability of smaller countries in the western Pacific to climate change, the Australian government established a program of climate research called the Pacific Climate Change Science Program (PCCSP 2 ) to meet highpriority science needs to support climate change adaptation 2 The PCCSP has subsequently moved under a new program of work called the Pacific-Australia Climate Change Science and Adaptation Planning Program. The majority of the work reported in this paper was fun...
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