ABSTRACT
In February and March 2005 the Cook Islands experienced a swirl of five strong cyclones having a devastating impact through high winds, storm surge, and damaging waves. Subsequently, on many occasions, residents and outside observers have linked these incidents of extreme weather with climate change. Since then it has been ‘all over’, an officer at the National Environment Service explained five years later. At this point, numerous NGOs working in the area had taken up climate change as a priority area, and the National Environment Service and external consultants had produced a long series of vulnerability assessments on the main island, Rarotonga, and on several of the 14 outer islands, among them several low-lying atolls, concluding that climate change is observable in a number of ways. The local newspapers had started to report from workshops, sites, and projects related to climate change, and many people on the islands had increasingly become aware of global warming as a threat to the islands and their inhabitants. In a turn, the cyclones made climate change present.
