Patrick Nunn

This book chapter highlights the affinities between traditional spirituality and sustainability. Across global and local contexts, development initiatives have often privileged outsider perspectives and technocratic interventions that misalign with local worldviews. Consequently, many climate change adaptation efforts have proved ineffective and unsustainable, shaped by foreign agendas and external funding. Moreover, many traditional knowledge-holders perceive modern development models as grounded in materialism, consumerism, and excess, rendering them incongruent with their local values and cosmologies. Set against this background, the chapter calls for a paradigmatic shift in research, policy, and practice to better harness the synergies between traditional spirituality and sustainable development. Such alignment promises adaptation strategies that are not only more effective and enduring but also more equitable, ethical, and culturally grounded. The chapter also introduces this volume—Handbook of Traditional Spirituality and Sustainability—outlining its structure, thematic focus, and individual contributions across seven regional and conceptual sections.

Throughout the island groups of the western Pacific, there exist culturally-grounded protocols for acknowledging once-inhabited places that have been submerged. Such protocols typically involve signs of respect made by persons sailing over sunken places; it is commonly said that a failure to abide by such protocols may result in calamity. Associated with these protocols are sights of lands beneath the ocean surface that are inhabited in much the same way as are those on modern island coasts. Sounds and scents coming from undersea lands have also been noted in some instances. These protocols and traditions are interpreted as reconstituted memories of land sinking, often hundreds of years ago, that enabled them to be preserved and sustained in pre-literate (oral) contexts. These protocols and traditions are referenced through a spiritual lens, the provision of land and its removal from human use being regarded as divine acts that need to be constantly acknowledged. The main function of these protocols and traditions is principally historical, enabling present populations to recall place-based pasts that give them identity and entitlement. Their function is also pragmatic, concerned with having people who are alive today understand past and present risks from environmental hazards, something that is key to sustaining livelihoods, especially in such tectonically unstable environments. In an era of climate change, where many coastal settlements are likely to be rendered uninhabitable in the next few decades as a result of sea-level rise, such protocols and traditions have a role to play in helping people adapt. For they demonstrate that issues of land loss and population displacement are not unprecedented in this region—and that anticipatory adaptation is therefore desirable. While the Pacific Islands region is a good place to document and analyse such cultural protocols and associated traditions, there are signs that such cultural expressions were once widespread and served similar purposes elsewhere in the world. This study shows that dismissing such cultural protocols and stories as ‘myth’ or ‘legend’ risks losing valuable insights into human pasts, especially in non-western contexts.

The exploration and settlement of the Pacific Island world is one of the most remarkable achievements of humanity. Early seafarers, skilled in navigation, discovered diverse habitats and biotas extending across a third of the globe. In this “sea of islands,” they established thriving communities where they lived for thousands of years. Today, although island ecosystems and cultures are facing great change, Pacific Island peoples remain resilient.

This new edition of a popular text reviews the diverse landforms, climates, ecosystems, societies, and cultures of the Pacific region. Seventy-five contributors—including numerous Indigenous scholars—address two key themes: (1) environmental dilemmas and possibilities, and (2) demographic, economic, and political challenges facing the people of the region.

New chapters highlight hydrology, ecosystem disturbance, conservation, Indigenous origins and activism, social media, ethnography, kava, contemporary dance, theater, and the cultural impact of globalization.

Other noteworthy chapters are significantly updated: biogeographical dynamics, prehistory of Near and Remote Oceania, fisheries and aquaculture, the fluidity of gender, mobility and urbanization, tourism as encounter, island economies, shifts in literary trends, Pacific music, water and development, and a new overview of land, marine, and water tenure.

The book concludes with a reflective essay. Pacific Island societies have been coping with environmental and demographic challenges for millennia; surviving societies have much to teach us about sustainable living, social justice, and reconciliation.

Policy makers, educators, students, and the general public will find this book an indispensable resource for understanding the region’s past, present, and future. [Book Synopsis]

Climate change in Australia is manifesting through rising temperatures, sea levels, extreme weather events, and changes in precipitation patterns, impacting communities through health risks, agriculture disruptions, and threats to biodiversity. Future climate change in Australia is projected to have significant implications on the environment, ecosystems, and society exacerbating existing challenges. Over 67% of Australian schoolchildren consider the environment a crucial issue and express concern about climate change, with many reporting high psychological distress. Australian schoolchildren are keenly aware that their generation is among the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and have expressed frustration at the lack of policy change and action to mitigate climate change. Australian schoolchildren and young people have expressed their concerns and feeling about climate change in public protests, strikes, and demonstrations, and grassroots organizations (e.g. School Strike 4 Climate) calling for urgent action on climate change. The purpose of this chapter is to examine aspects of climate change in Australia, with a particular emphasis on the perspectives and experiences of young Australians.

Whether you are a research student, perhaps doing your PhD, or an early career academic starting a career in academia, always remember one thing. You are one of the luckiest people in the world. You may never make lots of money, own a fancy house or more than one car, but you are fortunate to be employed in what Malcolm Bradbury once termed the 'delirious professions'. Many other jobs are deadly dull, some physically destructive or mentally wearing, but you are immensely privileged. You are training to contribute to human advancement so how could you not be 'delirious'? Seize the day. Read, understand, ponder, talk to your colleagues, and learn what they do. Education is not filling a bucket. It is lighting a fire.

Knowledge about periodic catastrophe in oral societies, representing a form of risk management, was accumulated and communicated for sometimes thousands of years.
Three thematic examples are discussed. First, the use of ‘storytelling’ in oral societies was largely for pragmatic reasons ; only in literate contexts has storytelling become culture-defining and a form of entertainment. In oral societies, storytelling was supplemented by art and performance to ensure that practical information about risk history was comprehensively communicated across generations. Second, many oral societies occupying regions with geographically-bounded risks (like active volcanoes or exposed coasts) developed place-avoidance protocols that kept people away from dangerous areas – an effective form of risk management. Third, growing evidence suggests that many oral societies developed ways of recognizing precursors of disaster (especially earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) that allowed people to remove themselves from danger zones before catastrophe occurred.
Both modern (literate) and oral societies had comprehensive systems of risk planning and management that enable them to survive periodic catastrophe. Understanding and combining approaches is helpful to future risk management.

People on oceanic islands are disproportionately affected by climate change: Today, in the future, and in the past. The range of possible response options for island peoples is not as broad as it is for people occupying larger landmasses. Understanding how island peoples responded to past climate change before they had significant contact with the outside world can help understand optimal future responses by recognising the special characteristics of such comparatively small isolated places.

Studies of Fiji’s hillforts (koronivalu) suggest they were initially constructed as a response to growing conflict caused by climate-driven coastal-resource depletion, an argument that appears tenable for other island contexts in the Asia-Pacific region. Data from studies of hillforts in four areas of Fiji are presented – Sigatoka Valley (Viti Levu Island), Ba Valley and Vatia Peninsula (Viti Levu Island), western Bua Province (Vanua Levu Island and Yadua Island), and Kadavu Province (Ono Island). Using available radiocarbon ages from hillforts, the key insights from each of these areas are explained and evaluated as responses to climate-driven environmental change.

An overview of past responses to climate change on oceanic islands is outlined, informed by insights from the study of Fiji’s hillforts and key lessons for the future identified. Principal among these is that the need for transformational adaptation becomes evident on islands earlier than it might on continents owing to the contrast in the numbers of available adaptation options.

Small Island Developing States like Fiji are climate change hotspots. Adaptation to climate change is thus paramount. Research has underlined the importance of indigenous or local knowledge and community participation for island communities to successfully adapt to the effects of a changing climate, such as sea-level rise and shoreline change. Yet, indigenous knowledge and community participation are not enough. We here point to the need to combine indigenous and scientific knowledges.

We use the example of seawalls in rural Fiji communities to illustrate our argument. Although seawalls are very popular throughout the Fiji archipelago (and beyond), they are largely ineffective and unsustainable solutions to a long-term problem. Particularly in rural locations, seawalls fail to reduce shoreline erosion and groundwater salinization, or to protect infrastructure and settlements from flooding. Although the decision-making process is participatory and bottom-up, and although local knowledge inputs to decision-making may be considerable, integration of local and scientific knowledge to create adaptive, situated knowledge and to build climate resilient communities is generally lacking.

Successful climate change adaptation requires informed investigation of the local context, the drivers of change, and local inhabitants’ awareness of the consequences of different response measures. To create such situated knowledge through community participation, scientific information on climate change as well as the advantages and disadvantages of various coping strategies must be effectively communicated to community decision-makers and integrated with existing local cultural knowledge. Real empowerment requires appropriately skilled persons with both a scientific understanding of climate change combined with a sense of locality and a vested interest in the long-term security of its inhabitants.

Most climate-change adaptation in the Pacific Islands has been framed in secular terms yet applied in contexts where routine decision-making is spiritually informed. This may be a major reason why such externally-sponsored adaptation has met with very limited success to date. This highlights an opportunity for reframing adaptation in ways that are more acceptable to target communities. Using a case study of traditional communities on a remote island in southern Fiji, information was collected using focus groups and informal interviews about people’s attitudes towards climate change, its causes, effects and remedies. Particular attention is given to understanding the ways in which people’s spiritual beliefs, incorporating both Christian and pre-Christian understandings, influence their perceptions of climate risk and determine their preferred adaptive responses. Given that this study is likely to be representative of rural, faith-engaged, contexts across the Pacific Islands region, it is argued that the results are widely applicable and should inform a re-evaluation of international/donor approaches to enabling climate-change adaptation in this region.