Pacific Sustainability and Climate Resilience

This course examines some of the ways in which community-based indigenous innovation has been used to build up strategies of adaptation and resilience in the Pacific’s oceanic communities. The course offers a critique of the deficit narratives that often characterise Pacific peoples as inherently susceptible to failure, and instead frames sustainability, resilience, and innovation as core features of Pacific peoples’ knowledge and practice for the millennia that they have occupied the Pacific Ocean - the largest single geographical space on the planet. The course acknowledges the rich histories of Pacific communities’ resourcefulness in adapting to environmental pressures and changes. It also explores such aspects of sustainability and resilience as adaptive social organization, coastal management, environmental restoration, food security, adapted building and architecture, and sustainable farming, and reviews how these are used to combat unsustainable economic practices, as well as rising sea levels, extreme weather systems, and other calamities brought about by human induced climate change. Several themes run through the course including the politics and economics of climate change, climate finance, mobility, food sovereignty, health and wellbeing, cultural safe-guarding and transformation, and socio-ecological justice. The course also reflects on the ways that indigenous knowledge, humanities, science and technology can work together to respond to the climate crisis and other natural and human created challenges in the Pacific.