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Most research on climate change in South Pacific island communities has privileged people’s observations of physical environmental change with less attention paid to how people interpret the causes of these changes. Increasingly, more studies are focusing on how communities are receiving messages about environmental degradation, and from whom they are receiving them. This case study draws upon ethnographic research conducted in November 2015 in Narikoso on Ono Island in Fiji’s Kadavu Group. This village was in the process of relocating inland as a response to shoreline erosion and severe coastal flooding. By employing data drawn from interviews with government actors, religious leaders, and residents of Narikoso village along with fieldnotes from participant observation, this paper examines how village residents interpreted coastal flooding and shoreline erosion according to the biblical story of Noah’s Ark alongside a secular narrative of climate change. I conclude by showing the unique challenges these worldviews had on the community’s decision to relocate. © 2020 The University of Western Australia.

How can religion help to understand and contend with the challenges of climate change?Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworld,edited by David Haberman, presents a unique collection of essays that detail how the effects of human-related climate change are actively reshaping religious ideas and practices, even as religious groups and communities endeavor to bring their traditions to bear on mounting climate challenges.People of faith from the low-lying islands of the South Pacific to the glacial regions of the Himalayas are influencing how their communities understand earthly problems and develop meaningful responses to them. This collection focuses on a variety of different aspects of this critical interaction, including the role of religion in ongoing debates about climate change, religious sources of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge informs community responses to climate change, and the ways that climate change is in turn driving religious change.Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds offers a transnational view of how religion reconciles the concepts of the global and the local and influences the challenges of climate change.

As the impacts of climate change intensify, potential relocation is becoming more of a reality for coastal communities throughout the world. This is furthering the demand for the implementation of governance relocation frameworks. In order to stay true to the principles of environmental justice while at the same time ensuring an effective policy that meets the needs and wants of affected communities, an adaptive relocation framework requires collaboration between state and non-state actors. It is thus important to pay attention to how non-state actors are incorporated into public participatory climate change adaptation efforts. In order to affectively address previous limitations of public participation, stakeholders must pay attention to already existing power systems. Through a case study approach of a village relocation project in Fiji, I examine the role of power in a climate change adaptation plan that involved the community of Vunidogoloa, local government, and national government stakeholders. I employ Steven Lukes’s three-dimensional framework of power to the case of Vunidogoloa, a Fijian village that relocated inland due to coastal erosion and shoreline flooding, to illustrate how the political arrangement of participation reinforced existing hierarchies between the village and the government.

Climate change has elucidated already existing gender inequalities associated with unequal access to resources, decision-making processes, and higher exposure to environmental shocks and stressors. Growing acknowledgment of the gender-differentiated implications of climate change in recent years has placed gender equality as a focal point in international discourses on climate change adaptation. The policy perspective of gender equality is universalized, but how it transcribes in local climate change adaptation projects remains elusive. Using the relocation of Vunidogoloa, Fiji, this article explores the tension and compatibility between the way gender equality is discussed and how it is implemented in climate change adaptation projects.

The grand challenge of preparing for climate impacts through climate adaptation relies on intermediaries, including local NGOs, consulting firms, and government agencies. Climate adaptation elicits evaluative tensions coming from what we call the dual organizational complexity. The dual organizational complexity includes evaluation ambiguity in (1) the interconnectedness and co-evolutionary dynamics of locally bounded social and ecological systems and (2) an increasingly complex network of interconnected organizations, including a diverse set of public, private, and semi-private actors who provide funding, market power, and expertise. We find that intermediaries address evaluative tensions through organizational scaffolding or building socio-material infrastructures that can support resilience and increase evaluative and adaptive capacity for future projects, albeit imperfectly. Importantly, we argue that climate adaptation needs facilitators with the capacity to connect very localized bottom-up needs to top-down resources in a continuous cycle of resource allocation, communication, and accountability, especially in the face of the increasing organizational complexity involved.

The United States has only recently begun investing in commercial-scale offshore wind energy (OWE). Although the United States is slow to progress, it is uniquely positioned to build on the existing knowledge that coastal European countries have applied for their own energy transitions. In this study, we analyze how federal and regional plans for expanding the OWE sector in the United States brought to the surface decade-long tensions related to multi-scale governance mismatches, jurisdictional conflicts, and unclear pathways for implementing national industrial policies. Drawing upon the European experience with OWE, we employ a dynamic multi-level perspective framework enriched by socio-ecological elements to examine the United States energy transition through its most promising technology. From our framework we identify six categories of OWE developments characterized by both unique and shared elements between the United States and European coastal countries. These elements are: (1) role of local communities, (2) governance structures, (3) multi-scale government interactions, (4) regional socioeconomic structures, (5) socio-ecological impacts, and (6) relationships with existing industries. Drawing upon our analysis, we identify and conceptually map four research areas in need of further development for the United States and the research community— (1) knowledge, (2) potential, (3) adaptation, and (4) learning. These insights provide critical information to ensure that the United States expansion into offshore energy generation is characterized by elements of justice, equity, and inclusive regional economic development.

Around the world adaptation projects are being implemented, with the hope of essentially climate proofing communities. While there is an abundance of failed adaptation schemes in developing and developed countries alike, there has been little scholarship on this problem. Through interviews with twenty-two climate change adaptation practitioners, we identify four structural challenges that contribute to maladaptation: the focus on technological fixes versus holistic approaches; the difficultly of distinguishing between adaptation and development; the problem of quantifying non-quantifiable variables; and the existence of competing problems given that failure to mainstream climate change adaptation. Addressing these maladaptation dynamics is necessary to enhance successful adaptation processes.