‘What Happens Next?’: Will Climate Change Wipe Out the Indo-Pacific?

Gabriel García Ochoa: One of the big problems of misinformation is that it is often fueled by good storytelling, and that's the dark side of narrative. Narrative candles be used for these dark purposes.

Tony Capon: In large cities in India, for example, when people are burning coal, people are dying from air pollution. That is something that we need to think about more as Australians because it's a moral and ethical question that we continue to make money from this without actively trying to transition.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: One cannot quantify or even begin to explore the true extent of the loss that Pacific Islanders will go through and some have already gone through when they have to migrate from their place of birth or their land of birthright into other areas due to the climate crisis.

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Susan Carland: Welcome back to What Happens Next?, the podcast that examines some of the biggest challenges facing our world and asks the experts, what will happen if we don't change, and what can we do to create a better future? I'm your host, Dr Susan Carland.

As humans, we instinctively use storytelling to make sense of complex issues like climate change. The stories we tell about this global challenge affect the way we understand it and influence our actions or inactions.

In the vast Indo-Pacific region, these narratives take on particular urgency. This area, stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific is uniquely affected by climate change, extreme weather events, unprecedented heat waves and rising sea levels.

The climate crisis has marched through our front door and made itself right at home, but when it comes to the Indo-Pacific, especially the Pacific islands, our narratives often lack the nuance to inspire meaningful action.

On the next two episodes of What Happens Next?, we'll explore the way bad climate storytelling can hinder rather than help, and why we need more accurate, empowering narratives to drive the urgent change we need. Keep listening to find out what happens next.

Christian Jakob: Hi, my name is Christian Jakob. I'm a professor here at Monash University. I'm the Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century, and my background is in modelling the weather and the climate.

Yeah, so the Indo-Pacific is such a big and interesting area. There's so many different climates. If you think about the Indian Ocean, Pacific Ocean together, right. So there's the climates of the tropics in the Indian monsoon, the Australian monsoon are big questions, how are they going to change? They bring water to agriculture in both nations, and all across what we refer to as the maritime continent, this island continent that includes Malaysia, New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, these islands. It's a continent in itself, but made of lots of islands, so it's known as the maritime continent in my world. We have the Pacific Islands, that are often very small and not far above sea level. We have Australia, a huge continent with different climates, very different in the north than it is in the south, and then go to New Zealand, huge mountain ranges, snow, everything, and then all the way down to Antarctica where the sea level rise story really has a big imprint.

We know from many decades of climate modelling that if we increase CO2 in the atmosphere, the world will get warmer. We know by how much, there's some level of uncertainty around how much. That's intrinsic in the models being uncertain, but that is much smaller than the uncertainty that comes from how much more CO2 will go into the atmosphere. If we know for sure the more CO2 we put in, the warmer it will get and the decision, the question, on whether we'll get a world that by the end of the century is four degrees warmer or two degrees warmer is not whether our models are certain or not. The models are certain enough to answer that.

And we know that we'll get to four degrees in a business-as-usual, keep-emitting scenario, and we can limit it as radical changes to the economy to make the economy net-zero in terms of carbon emissions, we can probably keep it at two. Maybe the ship of one and a half has sailed, but the ship of two is still there, maybe two and a bit, and every 10th of a degree counts.

Susan Carland: Yes.

Christian Jakob: You can read it up in the recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that directly relates gigatonnes of carbon emitted to change in temperature, and it's very clear that the more we emit, the warmer it will get. So we are very certain about that. Now it turns out a lot of us… While that's a really important number, global mean temperature, there's another very important global number that results from it, and that is, how much will the sea level go up?

Susan Carland: Yep, yes.

Christian Jakob: Because a lot of people live near the coast, and so if the sea level goes up more or less, that affects an enormous amount of people. The sea level rise comes from two things. First, the water gets warmer, as it gets warmer it expands, and then there's the second one, and that is the melting ice. But it's not the ice that swims on the ocean that matters, it's the ice that's locked up on land, and there are two major land masses where this happens, Greenland and Antarctica.

So Antarctica plays a huge role in the sea level rise story, and we hear lots of stories about glaciers melting much faster than people had anticipated, so on and so forth. So there's a danger there, of course, that the sea level rise, the warmer we make the planet, the higher the sea level rise will be. That's a given. And it's also a very slow process, so we've already locked in a certain amount of sea level rise, even if we stopped altogether emitting carbon into the atmosphere now, that would still be, the sea level would continue to rise for quite some time.

Susan Carland: What else in your modelling have you seen that you think or you predict will happen in the next 100 years, 50 years?

Christian Jakob: Well, as I said, so we know extreme events will very likely become more extreme and potentially more frequent as well. As a general statement, we are very confident in that. As a… Will it happen in Melbourne? Will it happen in Brisbane? Will it happen in the Indo-Pacific somewhere? That's much harder.

The warmer temperatures themselves are an issue because again, they lead to more heatwaves. A lot of the Indo-Pacific are tropical regions. Lots and lots, millions of people live in the tropics, in the Indo-Pacific, not only is it hot there, it's also very humid, and so in a humid place, when it gets warmer, it gets much more dangerous to you as a person than in a dry place.

Susan Carland: Why is that?

Christian Jakob: Because you can't sweat any more. So there's a limit to how our body... Our body loses heat through sweating very effectively, but then it gets very humid, that shuts down, and so there's a big danger.

Even though the temperature changes that are predicted for the tropics are much smaller than the temperature changes that are predicted near the poles, that's just a feature of the climate system and how it's going to change. We know that. We are very certain about that as well. The largest temperature changes will be near the poles, probably the smallest near the equator, but even that small change in a very humid climate can have a very large impact on human health.

Susan Carland: Professor Tony Capon is the director of the Monash University Sustainable Development Institute, and holds a chair in Planetary Health in the University's School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine.

Tony Capon: Certainly extreme weather events are a huge issue across our region. If we think about major typhoons in the Philippines, for example, also in Fiji, other parts of the Pacific. The bushfires here in Australia in 2019, 2020, those devastating fires made clear to us all that our climate's changed and it's harming our health, and the health of all other living species on Earth.

Susan Carland: And I think we often incorrectly think of those as discrete events. The typhoons in the Philippines, as you said, for example, or bushfires here, we're like, “Oh, it's tragedy.” Yes, it's climate change, and we forget that this is actually all part of the same struggling system.

Tony Capon: That's right. It's over time things are continuing to change. We'll see disruptions, and where we might see very significant changes we can't necessarily time those things. But climate change also intersects with a range of other challenges that we're facing, biodiversity loss, pollution, including air pollution. And so now we talk about a triple planetary crisis, climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, many connections to human health and well-being.

Susan Carland: Right, and then yes, as you said, connections to human health and wellbeing. They would all have to cascade down into what I imagine doctors see, and nurses and healthcare professionals see in terms of treating people, not just in the immediate aftermath; bushfire, obviously terrible burns and other tragedies, breathing in smoke, but longer-term effects as well, I imagine.

Tony Capon: Including mental health effects, the loss of our home or the loss of family members in these extreme events, the loss of our livelihoods. There's a range of flow on consequences that we don't always think about because they're less direct.

Susan Carland: Yeah. Is the Indo-Pacific region uniquely vulnerable to climate change, or is it just a microcosm of what's happening in other parts of the world?

Tony Capon: Certainly we're seeing climate change health effects all around the world. There's no doubt about that.

One of the big challenges in our region is the number of people living in informal settlements. We sometimes call these slum settlements where housing is very precarious, and that is a particular challenge when it intersects with climate change, whether it's an extreme event or whether it's a run of extremely hot weather, warm weather. The implications for somebody who lives in a slum is much more than if you live in an apartment here in Melbourne.

Susan Carland: You mentioned the significant health impacts that we're seeing from climate change in the Indo-Pacific. Are the health impacts getting worse along with the increase in extreme weather events?

Tony Capon: Absolutely. We're also getting better at identifying climate-related health effects, and that helps us get a better picture of the challenges that we face, but there's no doubt that we're seeing increases over time, and we're actually tracking this through what's called the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change.

Susan Carland: Tell us about that.

Tony Capon: Yeah, it was established about five years ago, led from UCL in the United Kingdom, financial support from the Wellcome Trust. Here in Australia, we were the first country to downscale to a national level so that we're actually tracking those indicators for Australia as well. There's about 40 indicators, climate health impacts, things like extreme heat and health, but also what we are doing about it. Are we starting to make policy changes, for example, that are relevant to protect health? And so that's giving us a better picture over time, and we can regrettably see that currently, this is getting worse.

At COP28 last year in Dubai at the Monash Pavilion, we hosted an event with health leaders from across the Pacific. So we had the Fiji Minister for Health, we had the permanent secretary for health from Tuvalu, and the Permanent Secretary of Health from Tuvalu. She explained that in that small country, very low-lying country, there's just a single hospital, and it is built in an area that is so low-lying that whenever there is very high winds, they are at risk of inundation, and obviously during a cyclone even more so. But regularly they have to move the patients from the ground floor of the hospital to upstairs to the upper level, which is usually for administration in the hospital.

Susan Carland: Right, so it's not set up for patients –

Tony Capon: It's not set up. And so there's direct implications for healthcare facilities, hospitals, clinics across the region. Many of these were built in coastal areas along rivers where people were congregating because they were good places to live. And so we've got a lot of infrastructure that's potentially at risk across the region.

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Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: My name is Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson. I am originally from the island of Savai'i in Samoa. I am a journalist and a journalism scholar by profession, and I have reported on the climate crisis for over 20 years from the front lines of the climate crisis in the Pacific Islands.

Climate change has had such a profound impact on the lives of Pacific Islanders. Right now, I'm standing on the coastline of my village in Safua in Savai'i, and in my lifetime, the mangrove coastline has eroded by about, I want to say 10 metres. That's an extraordinary shift in coastline in that period of time. So the impacts of climate change and how it's shifted our livelihoods have been extraordinarily profound in that when nature changes, our culture changes with it, because our culture is very much based on nature and how we interact with nature.

Susan Carland: Do extreme weather events, have they become normalised in your community?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Extreme weather events have always been a part of our lives ever since I can remember. There's always an anticipation of a cyclone at the end of the year that came with Christmas and school holidays. So even though one is excited to have that end-of-year Christmas break and long break from school, we also always anticipated that a cyclone might hit at that time, and it will take up our time. So it's not that it's normalised now, is that it has always been a factor in our existence as Pacific Islanders. We always take extreme weather events into account in the way that we live our daily lives, and also plan for the year ahead.

Susan Carland: The global climate situation is dire, and the effects on the uniquely vulnerable Indo-Pacific region are already pronounced. The environmental impact is clear, but our communication could use some work.

Dr Gabriel García Ochoa, Director of Monash's Global Immersion Guarantee program and an expert on narratives surrounding sustainability, offers insight into the power of storytelling in climate communication.

Narratives can actually be more influential in a whole host of areas, but certainly with climate change, than giving people scientific information, telling people's stories as opposed to saying, “The Earth has increased this many degrees, and by this time we're all going to be dead, or this percentage of that.” Why is that? What is it about humans that seem more convinced, do you think by narrative, than just the cold hard facts?

Gabriel García Ochoa: I think there's a couple of things. Narratives, which are stories, really that's what they are. Stories help us make sense of the chaos of reality, not just everyday life, but every aspect of reality.

So we are very deeply wired. This has been going on for thousands of years to understand life through stories. If you tell me about your day, that's a little story. Stories help us put information together in a clear logical way, so we respond very well to stories, much better than we – and I'm generalising obviously – but most of us respond much better to stories, we understand that much better than we do scientific facts.

Susan Carland: Do you think that's because there's emotion in stories, and maybe we connect more with feelings than information? Gabriel García Ochoa: Our emotional responses to stories have a very important role to play in this, and this goes back to the fight, flight or freeze response. So that's a response that we have in the face of danger, right? There's another response that we humans have called the “tend and befriend” response.

And there's an amazing scholar, Angus Fletcher. He's a neuroscientist who does a lot of work on storytelling, and he says that we humans have this added response of “tend and befriend” that animals don't have, and that's in the face of danger we rally together, we look after each other. And that is because of stories, stories of belonging, stories of identity. So, who am I? Where do I come from? What group am I a part of? What is my responsibility to that group in the face of danger, such as climate change? We go back to those stories and we have emotional responses to those stories, and that's why we're usually spurred to action by stories much more so than we would be by facts.

Susan Carland: What do you see in the prevailing climate change narratives around you, and how convincing are they?

Gabriel García Ochoa: We've had two main narratives over the last few years. I think the climate action narrative on the one side, and of course, we have those who deny climate change, right? But I think the stronger narrative is the economic imperative to climate change. I think those are the two narratives that are battling. And the economic imperative is, there is a financial cost to taking action against climate change, and that can have a very negative effect on society, our lifestyle. So those are the two narratives that are constantly competing that I see in my work.

Susan Carland: So it's like the moral argument and the financial argument.

Gabriel García Ochoa: That's right.

Susan Carland: As we learned in our series on reality, in today's information-saturated world we are being bombarded with countless narratives all the time. This abundance of stories, some of which are misleading or entirely false, presents its own set of challenges.

Gabriel García Ochoa: I think there is an exhaustion of narratives. I think more than ever, we have access to so many stories. They're everywhere. I mean, forget about the SBS's 6 billion stories. There's trillions of stories, so we're exhausted by those stories, and you find them in social media all the time. Students often don't know what to believe and what not to believe. So I think universities play a very important role in discussing that and developing critical thinking. But also I think even those stories that we know are factual, that are real, we're desensitised to them now because of this prevalence of stories all the time, everywhere.

One of the big problems of misinformation is that it is often fueled by good storytelling, and that's the dark side of narrative. Narrative candles can be used for these dark purposes. So when you have stories that don't tell the truth, but they're well told, again, we're much more prone to believing them because they're a well-told story. And that's how conspiracy theories work. For example, conspiracy theories are not rational, but they're logical in that they follow narrative thinking. They follow what I was talking about before, this causal reasoning of cause and effect. So you follow a plot, A, B, C, D, a plot of action and reaction that is logical, but it's not rational, and it's very easy to fall for those narratives, for those stories, and that's really dangerous.

Elissa Waters: Most of us would've heard and seen media stories about disappearing islands, and that threat of the future of whole countries possibly disappearing under kind of worst-case scenarios for climate change. But I think probably the most important thing here is thinking about vulnerability, a little bit more complexly than that narrative, that's quite a simplistic narrative.

Susan Carland: And narratives about the Indo-Pacific region, particularly concerning the Pacific Islands, may not fall into the realm of conspiracy theory, but they often resort to oversimplification and stereotypes. Dr Elissa Waters is a political geographer at Monash University working in climate adaptation in the Pacific and Australia.

Elissa Waters: There's a bunch of things that make Pacific Islands kind of vulnerable. One of those is the kind of idea of exposure. So when we think about vulnerability, we think about the extent to which a people or a place is exposed to a particular threat or change. And so for the Pacific, this is fairly obvious, right? They're in an area of the world where we're already seeing increasing frequency and severity of extreme events. We're seeing rising sea levels and increases in ocean acidification and things like that. That one, I guess, is a fairly obvious kind of vulnerability, but there's also this idea about the extent to which a community or a group of people are sensitive to those changes.

So if you think about many Pacific Islands they're low-lying, and so when you have big storms or kind of flooding, that becomes a real issue. But there's also sensitivities in terms of the way that they're able to cope with droughts, which is actually a big issue in the Pacific, surprisingly. So if you imagine a really small island that's very remote, they're not able to switch to different water sources and things like that as easily.

Susan Carland: Here's Dr Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson. Relocation is often discussed as a solution to rising sea levels. But what would that mean for you and your community culturally and emotionally if you did just have to move?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: We are very much connected to land. In Samoa the land where you grow up is the land where your ancestors grew up, and it's passed down by generations. The bloodline that runs through you, that connects you to that piece of land. And so therefore the history of your family, the myths and legends of your community is based in that area. When you propose or suggest that a villager relocates from their community, you are basically pulling a rug from under them, because you can't shift the spiritual value that comes with being in a certain place with being in your village and in your community. You can't shift the coconut tree that has been there for generations and marks a certain event in the history of that village. Shifting burial grounds, which bring with it the mana and the spirit of our ancestors, it's impossible to transplant such significant spiritual and cultural, valued places when you have to migrate to a new land.

So one cannot quantify or even begin to explore the true extent of the loss that Pacific Islanders will go through, and some have already gone through, when they have to migrate from their place of birth or their land of birthright into other areas due to the climate crisis.

Susan Carland: Here's Elissa.

Elissa Waters: In terms of permanent migration, so permanent out-migration, we don't have a lot of evidence that there is large-scale permanent out-migration occurring from these places. That's not to say that that won't happen into the future, particularly under the worst-case scenarios for climate change. But I think what we need to remember is migration is a really kind of long-standing complex adaptive response that has been playing out in the Pacific for centuries in response to both local and regional environmental change. And so you have people and also economic change. So you have people moving to and from small island groups within the region, they move across those island groups. People migrate for education and then return back to Pacific countries. So it's really been a long-standing response to change.

The thing here is the question of mass permanent out-migration, and that is within the Pacific, and for people themselves has been expressed very clearly as a measure of last resort. People don't want to leave their homes. They don't want to leave their ancestral lands. And so yeah, it's a complex question.

Susan Carland: Elissa is keen to emphasise the importance of nuanced perspectives and storytelling when it comes to climate change in the region. Oversimplified or misrepresented narratives can have serious consequences for policy funding and even human rights.

Elissa Waters: When we're talking about the potential for mass migration from these countries, we really need to be careful about that narrative because assuming that that is what is going to happen, kind of takes a lot of adaptation measures off the table. It kind of disincentivises funding for short and medium-term adaptation options, and that's kind of really damaging.

So in that case, those funding for those smaller, more short- and medium-term solutions, they're a real right for those people in those countries. And I've argued with colleagues from Melbourne University that should be considered as a human right, those measures to increase the chances of being able to live a good life in your country while we work out what we're going to do about the longer term kind of prospects is a human right.

Susan Carland: As a journalist born and raised in Samoa, Lagi is quick to point out that inadequate reporting and storytelling often overlook crucial cultural aspects, and fail to capture the true resilience and strength of local communities in the face of climate challenges.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: But Pacific Islanders are extremely resilient. A cyclone hits the next day, you get up, rebuild the village rebuilds. We don't wait for anybody. So those stories and the true value and the richness of cultures, even for places like Niue, where there is a real population of only 1,500 people, it's really significant.

And so for a long time, international media has not really given the depths of coverage that islands deserve to really, truly tell that story of the true impact of the crisis on Pacific Island nations, but also the way that Pacific Island nations cover... Sorry, live through it, and have come up with Indigenous climate solutions to continue being resilient and live on our islands.

Susan Carland: Lagi, I can hear the beautiful singing in the background. It's so nice.

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: Can you hear now?

Susan Carland: It's so nice. I love it. What role do you think local communities and particularly traditional practices play in building resilience to climate change?

Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson: There's such a large role in the traditional and indigenous knowledge and traditional knowledge in building resilience, but also in climate solutions at the village level, national level, and in the regions that we have in the Pacific.

I think it's important to note that in Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia, there are very distinct but also connected cultures that is based on chiefly tribal and historical cultural practices. Entrenched in those practises and those cultural norms are natural climate solutions, our natural resilient measures that our ancestors passed down to us, but also that we learn over time through interacting with nature. So the roles that Pacific communities have is extraordinary in replicating some of the climate solutions, but also learning from each other on how we deal with some of the losses due to the climate crisis.

Susan Carland: The other issue with these oversimplified narratives is that they often obscure some of climate change's largest contributors, possibly because confronting these uncomfortable truths require us to reconsider our own roles and responsibilities.

Tony Capon: I think one of the key things is that we need to acknowledge we've got a problem. And here in Australia with our recent change of national government, it is good that we're talking about these issues. We're starting to confront them actively, and this helps us be a good neighbour to our Pacific Island neighbours, other parts of the region, because if we are not acknowledging that things need to change, then we are not a good neighbour in the region.

And it's not just how we live in Australia and cleaning up our act, going green here, if you like. It's also about our sources of foreign revenue, which at the moment include selling coal, increasingly gas, which is contributing to climate change as a problem, but it's also directly harming health. When those fossil fuels are burnt in large cities in India, for example, when people are burning coal, people are dying from air pollution.

And that is something that we need to think about more as Australians because it's a moral and ethical question that we continue to make money from this without actively trying to transition. And to make our foreign income from perhaps green energy rather than fossil fuel exports.

Susan Carland: What's your sense from working with our neighbours in a medical and in a health sense? Do you get a sense that they feel that Australia is doing enough to support them? Is there something different that they want from us?

Tony Capon: Look, if I was frank, I would say that our neighbours are disappointed where we are at the moment. I think we spent a decade or more here in Australia denying that climate change was an issue. As I said, that has changed. There's been a changing national conversation. I personally don't think if this is a party-political issue, I think we all need to be doing more in this space. And as I said, it's not just about how we live in Australia, it's about how we engage with the world and being a globally responsible country, including in relation to climate change.

Susan Carland: Right. It's not right for us to say, “Okay, Australia's going to go fully renewable,” for example, while still selling coal overseas.

Tony Capon: Absolutely, and whenever we are doing that, we have to be clear-eyed about the fact that that can't continue. There has to be a timetable for changing that so that we are moving from what in development we call negative spillover, from one country to another, there's harms to health from us continuing to export fossil fuels, to positive spillover. If we're exporting renewable energy directly, or materials for the transition in other country, minerals for the transition, if you like. Those are things that we need to be having conversations about and planning for, getting on the front foot.

Susan Carland: Next week on What Happens Next?, we'll learn how to tell better stories about the future of our planet, the kind that celebrate climate action successes and inspire meaningful change, moving beyond doom and gloom to hope and empowerment.

Thank you to all our guests on today's episode. You can learn more about their work by visiting our show notes.

If you are enjoying What Happens Next?, don't forget to give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and share the show with your friends. Thanks for joining us. See you next week.