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Imagine you were in charge of construction Roads and bridges span a series of Pacific islands. Transporting materials and personnel across oceans is difficult and expensive, so you’ll want to sustain your development for years or even decades into the future.
As a result, as civil engineers in weatherized Pacific Islands often do, existing data on rainfall and weather patterns are used to plan towns, ideally with infrastructure built to accommodate the largest rainfall event in the country’s history. and may decide to withstand the harshest storms. faced.
Such an approach usually works well. We need to ensure we build sustainable and resilient cities, prepared for the worst conditions we have ever seen. But Pacific engineers on the front lines of climate change are struggling to adapt and prepare as the planet’s rising temperatures defy existing weather forecasts.
They include planners in Vanuatu, who are finding that their roads, buildings and towns are no longer able to withstand rapid sea level rise, frequent storms and devastating floods in recent years. There is.
“During these extreme weather events, a large amount of waste flows in and destroys most of the beaches and much of the infrastructure,” said Raviki Tarae, Infrastructure Sector Coordinator at the Vanuatu Public Works Authority.
“The pavement is not strong enough to withstand the amount of water that has flowed along the road.”
Last year, Vanuatu was hit by three powerful cyclones. These include Cyclone Laura, the earliest Category 5 storm in Pacific history, which devastated northern and central islands last October. Climate scientists predict that the frequency and intensity of these extreme weather events will continue to increase in the Pacific region, putting a strain on public services.
“It’s scary, but it’s reality. We can’t run away from it,” Tarae says.
In the face of these challenges, a new platform aims to provide effective, science-based climate projections to help Pacific authorities prepare to fight climate change.
The Vanuatu Climate Future Portal, launched in November as part of Vanuatu’s Van-KIRAP project, provides a snapshot of what the country’s climate will be like 30, 50 years or almost a century into the future. A web-based tool that provides It shows users an interactive map of Vanuatu, as well as predicted precipitation, minimum and maximum temperatures for each location. These predictions change depending on the year and geographic region selected by the user, giving government officials like Tarae a glimpse of what Vanuatu’s islands will look like decades from now.
The portal seeks to transform detailed climate modeling, often stored within the pages of IPCC reports and scientific journals, into more actionable and accessible information that can be visualized and used by policy makers. said Geoff Goosley of the Australian research agency CSIRO, who helped develop the website.
“The science of climate change is largely based on predicting future climate using model output, which is extremely complex and technically challenging,” Gooley says.
“The idea of this project was to transform science into a more user-friendly service.”
The portal’s modeling is built on a variety of datasets, including current and historical data obtained from satellites and weather stations. Of course, these forecasts are not as accurate as a one-week weather forecast. Because the timescales are so large, Gooley explains, “there is always some inherent uncertainty in the model.” But he says they provide valuable information to Vanuatu’s decision-makers.
“We use global climate models to simulate current and future climate. We then run these simulations over longer timescales to understand what the potential climate future will be. “We can predict what will happen,” he said.
“We’re not saying the future will be like this. We’re saying that depending on what models you have and how much faith we have in those models, We are saying that future situations may extend to this range.”
Portal mapping will also depend on how humanity responds to the climate crisis in the coming years. In that prediction he sees two different scenarios unfolding. One is for “high emissions” and the other is for “low emissions.” Each of these represents a different outlook, depending on whether world leaders stick to the proposed Paris climate goal of keeping global temperatures below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
Understandably, Vanuatu’s future presents many challenges if it continues down the ‘high emissions’ path. Under this worst-case scenario, the portal shows that average temperatures could rise by more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2070, with most regions seeing heavy rainfall and extreme temperature increases.
Such a worst-case scenario could pose significant challenges not only to roads and infrastructure, but also to businesses, agriculture and food security across the country.
Sunny Kamuta Suseu of SPREP, the intergovernmental agency that partnered with CSIRO and the Vanuatu government to deliver the portal, said this dire prediction meant that national leaders needed to be aware of and prepare for the coming decades. He says it shows.
“We are changing the system and changing the way policy is coordinated. [so that] Long-term climate change information will be available to people now,” Suseu said.
“They can develop plans and policies to ensure that whatever they are building now will last into the future.”
That means ensuring that city planners aren’t the only ones holding this information. Ultimately, the team will bring the Climate Futures Portal to communities across the country so that village leaders, local fishermen, and farmers can benefit from learning how their landscapes and environments are changing due to climate. I am thinking of doing so.
“Remote communities continue to rely on traditional knowledge to manage the climate risks and hazards they face on a daily basis,” Suseu explains.
“But the limitation is that we don’t have traditional knowledge about long-term climate change timescales. So this is where the portal really complements that knowledge.”
But with climate change potentially having deep and far-reaching impacts on Pacific islands, it is difficult to know exactly how the information provided by the Climate Futures Portal will be best used. Governments are reluctant to plan decades ahead, and properly planning for potential climate change is difficult, especially in cash-strapped Pacific countries that struggle to even meet the immediate needs of their communities. This is almost impossible for the government.
For Suseu, the key is not to make sweeping changes to national policies or the economy, but rather to ensure that climate information is used in day-to-day planning. He uses the example of tourism operators to illustrate his point.
“If you’re going to do a million-dollar resort or development, you need to understand what the calculated risks are of making that investment in that area,” Susseu explains.
“[Questions like] Whether you want to be closer to the ocean or closer to a river, our climate change portal can help inform your decision. ”
Some of that work is already underway. Back at Vanuatu’s public works department, Tarae’s team used the portal to create a new road design guide. The guide incorporates rainfall forecasts to make stronger recommendations for where and how to build the country’s roads. He says some of this information is “very new” and unexpected because they are not climate scientists. But he has already noticed that it has had a positive impact on his own work.
“All the information is there, but it’s up to us how we use it,” Tarae says.
“That will determine how resilient we can be.”
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