Patrick Nunn

For thousands of years, Pacific Island communities survived rising seas, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and storms—without satellites, sensors, or climate models.

In this episode of H2O and Beyond, I speak with Patrick Nunn, a geologist who has spent more than three decades working with Pacific Island communities, learning how traditional knowledge preserved real environmental history—and how colonization disrupted it.

We explore how myths and legends are actually encoded memories of past disasters, why many Pacific Islanders historically avoided coastlines, and how modern climate adaptation efforts often fail when they ignore local knowledge. We also discuss why money alone won’t solve climate change, and why the future depends on combining Indigenous knowledge with Western science.

This episode challenges the idea that vulnerable communities are helpless—and asks what we’ve lost by failing to listen.

Patrick Nunn has spent his career looking at the scientific evidence of catastrophic natural events that occurred thousands of years ago, like volcanic eruptions, and meteor crashes. He's found that many of these disasters were witnessed by people and their stories were memorised and passed on for thousands of years. Patrick says it's now recognised by science that many of the stories once thought of as 'folk memories' were actually eyewitness accounts, based on observations of a geological phenomenon. The Indigenous people of north-west America remember the creation of Crater Lake, which occurred seven thousand years ago. Aboriginal people recorded the drowning of the Australian coastline, which happened at the end of the last Ice Age. Patrick says the evidence for the factual basis of these events was always there in the stories but, until now, nobody was listening.