Locally led adaptation: Promise, pitfalls, and possibilities.

Locally led adaptation (LLA) has recently gained importance against top-down planning practices that often exclude the lived realities and priorities of local communities and create injustices at the local level. The promise of LLA is that adaptation would be defined, prioritised, designed, monitored, and evaluated by local communities themselves, enabling a shift in power to local stakeholders, resulting in more effective adaptation interventions. Critical reflections on the intersections of power and justice in LLA are, however, lacking. This article offers a nuanced understanding of the power and justice considerations required to make LLA useful for local communities and institutions, and to resolve the tensions between LLA and other development priorities. It also contributes to a further refinement of LLA methodologies and practices to better realise its promises. Ultimately, we argue that the utility of the LLA framing in promoting climate justice and empowering local actors needs to be tested empirically.

Emotions of the Anthropocene across Oceania.

As human activities have destabilised life on Earth, a new geological era is upon us. While there is a myriad of challenges that have emerged because of such human-driven planetary changes, one area of investigation that requires ongoing scholarly attention and scientific debate is the emotions of the Anthropocene. The emotional, mental, and psychological burdens induced by rapid and unprecedented change must be understood to better reflect the experiences of people around the globe and to initiate conversations about how emotions may be used for transformative change and effective politics. This paper aims to provide insights into the types of emotions that are emerging in Oceania as the Anthropocene unfolds. To do this, we draw on several data sets: questionnaire results with visitors of Mt Barney Lodge in the World Heritage Gondwana area in Queensland, Australia; another questionnaire with Pacific Island "experts" engaged in climate change, development, and disaster risk management work; interviews with locals living in the Cook Islands; and various spoken, written, and visual art from the Pacific. Bringing these data sets together allows us to explore a diversity of experiences, perspectives, and emotional responses to the Anthropocene from participants across Oceania. We found that acute and slow-onset weather events, experiences of direct loss and change, a perceived lack of agency or control over futures, and a sense of injustice triggered emotions including fear, stress, anxiety, exhaustion, sadness, grief, anger, frustration, helplessness, worry, but also empowerment. These results are critical for the first step of acknowledging and naming the emotions that are emerging in Oceania, such that they can then be worked through, and may be used for transformative change, effective politics, and agency over futures.

Cascading loss and loss risk multipliers amid a changing climate in the Pacific Islands.

Human society has experienced, and will continue to experience, extensive loss and damage from worsening anthropogenic climate change. Despite our natural tendencies to categorise and organise, it can be unhelpful to delineate clean boundaries and linear understandings for complex and messy concepts such as loss and damage. Drawing on the perspectives of 42 local and regional Pacific Islander stakeholders, an underexplored resource for understanding loss and damage, we explore the complexity and interconnectedness of non-economic loss and damage (NELD). According to participants, Pacific Islander worldviews, knowledge systems and cosmologies often make it difficult to separate and evaluate NELD independently, challenging the nomenclature of NELD categories developed through international mechanisms. Instead, NELD understandings are often centred on the interdependencies between losses, including the cascading flow-on effects that can occur and the nature of some losses as risk multipliers (i.e. one loss creating the risk for further losses). Most notably, losses to biodiversity, ecosystem services and land are critically linked to, and have cascading effects on, livelihoods, knowledge, ways of life, wellbeing, and culture and heritage. We argue that loss and damage is not always absolute, and that there are NELD that are arguably reparable. Concerning, however, is that biodiversity loss, as a risk multiplier, was considered the least reparable by participants. We put forward that NELD understandings must consider interconnectivity, and that biodiversity and ecosystem conservation and restoration must be the focus for interventions to prevent irreparable and cascading losses from climate change in the Pacific Islands.

From community-based to locally led adaptation: Evidence from Vanuatu.

The Green Climate Fund, donors, governments and non-governmental organisations, among others, are pouring vast amounts of financial and human capital into community-based adaptation across the developing world. The underlying premise is that the world's majority-who have the minority of financial capital-are living on the margins and are the most vulnerable and at risk from climate change. Such a reality, coupled with a deficit understanding of the majority world, is resulting in significant implications for how the 'adaptation industry' (those that fund, design and implement projects) go about their work. Drawing on research evaluating 15 community-based adaptation projects in Vanuatu we found that despite genuine attempts, projects invariably fell short of success, longevity and sustainability. We argue that the indifferent, albeit variable, success of most projects is attributable to the construction of the geographical scale of 'community-based' and the deficit view flowing down to the 'community' through hubris policy, funding guidelines and individual implementers. Our findings show that 'experts' are working in Pacific communities, conducting assessments that involve asking what 'community' needs are, going away to design projects, coming back and implementing projects, which communities are inevitably challenged to sustain once funding has ceased. We postulate that these limitations stem from such a formation of adaptation work that pejoratively fails to see Pacific Islanders in situ as the best litmus test of their own agendas, needs, aspirations and futures and in the best position to make decisions for themselves about what and how they might become more resilient. We claim from a growing body of evidence and new frontiers in research that, rather than adaptation being 'community-based', it needs to be 'locally led', not limited to 'communities', and should take place across different entry points and incorporate, as appropriate, elements of autonomous/Indigenous peoples ownership.

Solastalgia and the gendered nature of climate change: an example from Erub Island, Torres Strait.

This communication focuses on respected older womens' ('Aunties') experiences of climate and other environmental change observed on Australia's Erub Island in the Torres Strait. By documenting these experiences, we explore the gendered nature of climate change, and provide new perspectives on how these environmental impacts are experienced, enacted and responded to. The way these adverse changes affect people and places is bound up with numerous constructions of difference, including gender. The responses of the Aunties interviewed to climate change impacts revealed Solastalgia; feelings of sadness, worry, fear and distress, along with a declining sense of self, belonging and familiarity.