ABSTRACT
The ‘island’ has become an icon in climate change discourses, frequently mentioned for its acute vulnerability to sea-level rise, and in more nuanced accounts to extreme events. One problem with such discourses is that they mask the heterogeneity of island environments and of their social systems. The effects of climate change on islands and the communities that live on them are likely to be highly differentiated: not all places will experience the same changes; where changes are similar the magnitude and timing of them will likely differ; the sensitivity of ecological and social processes to changes differs from place to place; the capacity of social systems to adapt to these changes is also not homogenous; and the significance of changes to social systems will also differ (different communities value things differently). Within the Pacific Islands there is such heterogeneity in social and ecological systems across islands, and indeed in the case of many parts of Melanesia, within single islands, that simple claims about ‘island vulnerability’ are empirically impossible to sustain. This is important to recognize, not least because it means that ‘one size fits all’ approaches to adaptation are unlikely to be successful in any given place.
