Pacific Sustainability and Climate Resilience

This course examines ways in which community-based and indigenous innovation have been used to build up strategies of adaptation and resilience in oceanic communities, focusing on the Pacific. Deconstructing the deficit narratives characterising the Pacific Islands as inherently susceptible and reconceptualising the concepts of resilience and sustainability for socio-ecological justice is a key component of this course. Through thousands of years of navigation around the largest ocean on the planet and adapting to extreme weather systems such as cyclones and other climate change induced calamities, Pacific peoples have developed a high level of human innovation and resilience, which have formed their cultural strategies for survival. Community and indigenous knowledge relating to buildings, adaptive social organization, food security, farming, environmental restoration, coastal management will be explored. The critical issues of sustainability, resilience and adaptation to climate change and other natural and human created challenges in the Pacific. The Pacific Islands are at the forefront of extreme weather patterns and the course examines the ways in which indigenous knowledge, humanities, science and technology can work together to respond to the expanding and deepening environmental and human impacts.