“The challenges of climate change aren’t coming–we are living them”

~President Surangel Whipps of Palau

The workshop aimed to both facilitate the development and delivery of locally relevant and impact-driven climate early warning products to support sector-based decision-making in Palau and foster increased alignment and coordination of climate projects in country, including within the UNEP CIS-Pac5 as well as across other partners, such as the Local 2030 Islands Network.

To develop Climate Early Warning Systems (CLEWS), Pacific RISA followed the Pacific Islands Dialog process that was developed by NOAA in collaboration with USAID throughout the Pacific Islands region. Participants heard stories about climate events and impacts in Palau and engaged in interactive breakout activities to construct historical timelines and maps: creating a dataset of the “where and when” of those events and impacts that would later serve as a template for creating prototypes of sector-specific CLEWS for agriculture and health.

During the week, the Local2030 Islands Network celebrated the launch of a new Palau Green Growth Dashboard, a public-private partnership to track Palau’s progress toward locally-relevant sustainable development goals. Pacific RISA collaborators from the University of Guam’s Center for Island Sustainability and Guam Green Growth were present for the launch and were central to the development of Palau’s dashboard. Additional workshop sessions were dedicated to presentations by partners in the UNEP CIS-Pac5 program and discussions around how to harmonize data, as a means to support communication, coordination, and collaboration across projects and initiatives within Palau, and elevate the important messages from the week. Throughout the workshop, local artist Janine Tewid created a live graphic interpretation of the CLEWS discussions, which was unveiled at a reception held the evening of February 29.

Featured image: the Rock Islands of Palau. Photo by Krista Jaspers.

In the weeks prior to the Climate Change and Health Dialog, confirmed cases of dengue fever in RMI rose from around 60 new cases a week to more than 120 a week, with an estimated 8,000 of the country’s 53,000 citizens infected (Figure 1). Persistent dry, warm weather punctuated by short periods of intense rain have exacerbated the problem since the Christmas holiday season. This record-breaking epidemic has occurred in tandem with other, smaller outbreaks related to a lack of clean water: typhoid fever, diarrheal disease, and conjunctivitis.

Around 100 participants attended the Opening Ceremony of the Dialog (Figure 2), including His Excellency, RMI President David Kabua, former President Hilda Heine, the Honorable Ministers of Health and the Environment, the Secretary and Deputy Secretary of Health, Senators and Mayors representing many of the islands and atolls, the World Health Organization Liaison for Micronesia, and high school and college students from Majuro and Ebeye.

Speaking to all those gathered, Secretary of Health Jack Niedenthal explained, “The reason why climate change impacts the RMI and other nations of Micronesia so severely is that we have one of the highest rates of diabetes, tuberculosis in the world, so our health system is already overtaxed.”

The dialog process first asked participants to break into small groups and describe health outbreaks in the form of a timeline, then link them with climate and weather events that occurred at similar times, such as king tides, drought, and heat waves. Matthew Widlansky from the University of Hawaiʻi Sea Level Center and Reginald White from the National Weather Service Majuro office then described existing products and tools for the RMI region that have good predictive capacity for these key events.

On the second day of the workshop, small groups focused on identifying the types of products that would aid health officials in assessing early warning for the health impacts of climate variability and change, particularly vector-borne and waterborne diseases. The workshop concluded with a set of next steps for generating an early warning system for the health sector using the relevant forecast products in tandem with NOAA, the University of Hawaiʻi, and the National Weather Service Majuro office.