There is currently a strong El Niño event, for which there are significant impacts around Hawaii and the Pacific Islands, including extended drought conditions, enhanced risk of damaging tropical cyclones, increased risk of coral bleaching, and possible spread of vector borne disease and illness.

The evolution and duration, strength and impacts of individual El Niño events can vary, in some cases greatly. This makes constant monitoring and awareness extremely important for decision makers across multiple sectors. Impacts also vary by island, and these seven fact sheets outline different physical impacts on different sectors and projected trends in relevant climate variables for Hawaii, American Sāmoa, Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, the eastern and western Federated States of Micronesia, the Republic of Palau, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a recurring climate pattern involving changes in the temperature of waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean and the patterns of sea level pressure, lower- and upper-level winds, and tropical rainfall across the Pacific basin. This irregular oscillation between warm and cool patterns, referred to as the ENSO cycle, directly affects rainfall distribution in the tropics and can have a strong influence on weather across the Pacific basin.

The following El Niño fact sheetsfor Hawaii and the Pacific Islands were created by the NOAA Hawaii and Pacific Islands ENSO Tiger Team, and are immediately available for download and distribution to policy makers, natural resource managers, community members, and interested stakeholders. For more information, please contact the Pacific Region Climate Officer of the Pacific ENSO Applications Climate Center (peac@noaa.gov).

2015 El Niño and Pacific Islands Fact Sheets

Cover image: Sea surface temperature anomaly on 11/12/2015, visualization from http://earth.nullschool.net/ by Cameron Beccario, Real Time Global SST from MMAB / EMC / NCEP

Pacific RISA Research Fellow Dr. Kati Corlew contributed an article about climate change and social instability to the Community Psychology Practice blog last month, and we are pleased to share it with you here.  Her timely article explains that a well-established tenant of community psychology–that context matters–can be helpful in predicting how societies may be impacted by climate change.  The article offers research documenting how change or variability in the natural environment affects our physical and psychological well-being as individuals and communities.

Dr. Corlew received her Ph.D. in Community and Cultural Psychology at the University of Hawai`i at Mānoa. Her dissertation explored the threat of climate change to both land and culture in the Pacific Island Developing Country (PIDC) of Tuvalu.  Now, she is developing a social network analysis of climate change professionals in the Pacific Islands region as part of her work with Pacific RISA.

Psychology of Climate Change: Social Instability

By Kati Corlew, Ph.D.

Pacific Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments

East-West Center

American Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III is the top military officer for the security of the United States in the Pacific, including trans-Pacific security threats from North Korea and other Asian locations. He is the leader of the United States Pacific Command (PACOM), which monitors security for a region covering approximately one half of the earth’s surface.

In March, 2013, Admiral Locklear stated that climate change is the largest threat to security in the region, as reported by the Boston Globe.

Admiral Locklear stated:

“Certainly weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past. We are on super typhoon 27 or 28 this year in the Western Pacific. The average is about 17.”

Storms of this magnitude damage infrastructure and disrupt the stability of societal functioning. Crops are destroyed and freshwater is contaminated. With basic needs and social structures thrown into disorder or destroyed completely, communities (or even entire countries or regions) are left in a state of heightened instability that threatens security.

Additionally, sea level rise threatens the long-term ability of coastal and island communities to continue to be communities. The Boston Globe goes on to report:

“The ice is melting and sea is getting higher,” Locklear said, noting that 80 percent of the world’s population lives within 200 miles of the coast. “I’m into the consequence management side of it. I’m not a scientist, but the island of Tarawa in Kiribati, they’re contemplating moving their entire population to another country because [it] is not going to exist anymore.”

Wholesale migration of entire populations due to climate instability is expected to overlap heavily with the experiences of refugees from political instability and war. Climate refugees will be populations who have lost everything, perhaps even their country. Without their community structures and relationships, property, and political power, populations who are forced to migrate because of climate change may wind up in a nebulous, uncertain, and inherently unstable position. Instability is often coupled with violence.

In Community Psychology, we explore the ways in which our social, political, and natural environments affect the physical and psychological well-being of individuals and communities. In essence, context matters. Researchers have been documenting the effects of climate change and variability on community well-being. It has been shown, for example, that countries experiencing El Niño are more likely to also experience war.

“Countries where the majority of the population lives in areas that become much warmer in El Niño years (red) are more likely to experience wars than those where temperatures are less affected (blue).”

Of course, the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO, which includes El Niño and La Niña) is a seasonal weather pattern, not climate change. Do these things even relate? A recent consensus report about climate change in the Pacific indicates that they do.

Despite rumors of perfect and unchanging island weather, the Pacific is actually home to some pretty dramatic seasonal changes. A strong El Niño year can mean some island nations run out of drinking and irrigation water while others are plagued with storms. La Niña years can have similarly dramatic effects. In fact, the difference between an El Niño year and a La Niña year can be so strong that in the coming decades, the effects of climate change may be overwhelmed.

That is to say, in some years ENSO may greatly exacerbate climate change, while in other years ENSO could reverse the trends entirely. This means that we cannot expect to see a smooth slope of increasing impacts with climate change. We will instead see periodic upswings in disasters and climate change impacts, coupled with periods of relative calm.

In the coming decades, we can therefore expect periodic upswings in social instability. These “human dimensions” of climate change impacts on communities must be addressed along with the physical impacts.

References

Bender, B. (2013). Chief of US Pacific forces calls climate biggest worry. The Boston Globe, March 09, 2013. Retrieved 3/15/13 from http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2013/03/09/admiral-samuel-locklear-commander-pacific-forces-warns-that-climate-change-top-threat/BHdPVCLrWEMxRe9IXJZcHL/story.html.

Burke, J. (2012). Maldives’ political instability allows gang violence to flourish. The Guardian, October 22, 2012. Retrieved 3/15/13 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/22/maldives-political-instability-gang-violence.

Burkett, M. (2011). The Nation Ex-Situ: On climate change, deterrritorialized nationhood and the post-climate era. Climate law, 2, 345-374. Retrieved 3/15/13 from https://www.law.hawaii.edu/sites/www.law.hawaii.edu/files/content/coliver/345-374%20Burkett.pdf.

Duddy, P. D. (2012). Political unrest in Venezuela. Council on Foreign Relations Contingency Planning Memorandum No. 16. Retrieved 3/15/13 from http://www.cfr.org/venezuela/political-unrest-venezuela/p28936.

Keener, V. W., Marra, J. J., Finucane, M. L., Spooner, D., & Smith, M. H. (Eds.). (2012). Climate Change and Pacific Islands: Indicators and Impacts. Report for The 2012 Pacific Islands Regional Climate Assessment. Washington, DC: Island Press. Retrieved 3/15/13 from http://www.pacificrisa.org/projects/pirca/report-materials/#.UUN9tByG3D4.

Kovats, R. S., Bouma, M. J., & Haines, A. (1999). El Niño and health. World Health Organization Protection of the Human Environment Task Force on Climate and Health. Retrieved 3/15/13 from http://www.who.int/globalchange/publications/en/elnino.pdf.

Schiermeier, Q. (2011). Climate cycles drive civil war. Nature, 24 August 2011. Retrieved 3/15/13 from http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110824/full/news.2011.501.html.

Smith, H. (2013). Greece’s fragile political stability at risk as violence escalates. The Guardian, January 23, 2013. Retrieved 3/15/13 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/23/greeces-political-stability-violence-escalates.

Turchin, P. (2012). Dynamics of political instability in the United States, 1780-2010. Journal of Peace Research, 49(4), 577-591. Retrieved 3/15/13 from http://jpr.sagepub.com/content/49/4/577.abstract.

Vidal, J., Saeed, S. (2013). Bangladesh’s climate refugees: ‘It’s a question of life’ – audio slideshow. The Guardian UK, January 29, 2012. Retrieved 3/15/13 from http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/interactive/2013/jan/29/bangladesh-climate-refugees-audio-slideshow.

Williams, N., & Pradhan, M. S. (2009). Political conflict and migration: How has violence and political instability affected migration patterns in Nepal? Population Studies Center Research Report No. 09-677. Retrieved 3/15/13 from http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/pubs/abs/5938.

Cover photo: Local risk reduction actions, such as using coral rocks to build temporary walls in Kiribati to break the swell of increasingly large king tides, is one example of communities acting to reduce their vulnerability.  Photo by UNISDR; used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license.

A blue ribbon panel will meet to discuss future landfill options on Oahu. In the meantime, the state is still investigating last month’s medical waste spill at Waimanalo Gulch. One key question is why weren’t storm runoff systems built before rains pounded the Gulch? To get a sense of how it’s supposed to work, HPR’s Ben Markus visited a nearby landfill that managed to weather the storms. [source: Hawaii Public Radio]

On October 6, 2010, WFO Honolulu at their “wet season” press conference provided an outlook which indicated La Nina, wetter than normal conditions, and possibly of heavy rainfall events during January — April 2011. Based upon this forecast, PVT Land Company Ltd., spent $300,000 upgrading their storm runoff system for heavy rain situations at their privately owned landfill operating on Oahu’s west coast since 1985. The PVT landfill is a construction and demolition material solid waste landfill that is also licensed to accept asbestos-containing materials and petroleum-contaminated soil. Following a very heavy rain event on January 12, 2011, the landfill was able to open the next day because of the previous preparations they had completed saving thousands of dollars and possible very high Environmental Protection Agency fines. A nearby municipal landfill was closed by Environmental Protection Agency for 2 weeks and will face EPA fines after the event because the landfill released storm runoff contaminated by medical waste and other debris into the ocean. Syringes, vials and other waste washed up on nearby beaches for days. ( Listen to story at http://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/content/pvt-landfill-prepared-storms)

Prepared by Jim Weyman (Director, Pacific ENSO Application Center) based on a Hawaii Public Radio Story by Ben Markus.