*5.5. Changing Rainfall Patterns*

Most people on Malaita equate climate change with changing weather patterns. The PGSP ward profiles illustrate this clearly: People on the artificial islands identify erratic rainfall as the main climate change threat [29]. For instance, William Pwaisiho [73] quotes a man from Walande on how he feels about climate change:

*"The weather is abnormal, it's not really following the pattern as we have seen before. (* ... *) I feel scared about it. And even our children too are often scared. Because it's beyond our reach, what we are going to do about it. It's out of the way we can control it."*

Heavy rains can make the daily canoe trip to school hazardous for children (see Figure 10). During the koburu season, women have difficulties travelling to the market. Many wane asi have therefore opted to relocate to the mainland.

**Figure 10.** Children on their way to school (J. van der Ploeg, 2016).

It is predicted that changing rainfall patterns will constrain subsistence agriculture in the Pacific [74]. In Solomon Islands, rainfall patterns have shown little change since the 1960s [75], and there is no indication that extreme rainfall or drought is currently threatening food security on Malaita. The notorious 1997/1998 El Niño drought affected gardens in North Malaita, but the most serious problems were felt in the urban centers and on remote coral atolls [76]. Historically, the wane asi cultivated swamp taro, yams, and sweet potatoes on the mainland. Traditional crop rotation schemes and fallows have been shortened as farming systems have intensified over the past fifty years [77]. Consequently, soil degradation, erosion, and pests have become serious problems. Agricultural development is further hampered by a structural lack of technology, skills, credit facilities, farm-to-market roads, reliable energy supplies, and agricultural extension services [78]. There are a number of concerns about food security and nutrition on Malaita, particularly related to the replacement of traditional diets by cheap, nutritionally-poor imports, such as noodles, and its long-term impacts on health [79]. A number of other interconnected social and political problems, such as youth unemployment, poor healthcare and education, gender-based violence, land tenure disputes, corruption, alcoholism, urbanization, and expectations of modernity further contribute to food insecurity and health problems. These multiple stressors highlight the complexity of contemporary food systems [80] and the limits of focusing on a single explanatory factor when trying to solve these problems.

#### *5.6. Climate Change Adaptation Projects*

The sinking islands have become a dominant theme in global and local climate change discourses, and have become some sort of litmus test for international donors, government agencies, and development organizations [12]. Over the past ten years, a variety of CCDRM projects have been implemented on the artificial islands of Malaita (see Table 2). It is estimated that, in the period 2010 to 2016, at least USD 112 million has been allocated for CCDRM projects in Solomon Islands [81].



Electrification.

Agency for International

 SPC: Pacific Community, SPREP: Secretariat of the Pacific Regional

 Development.

 USP: University of the Southern Pacific.

Environmental

 Programme.

 UNDP: United Nations Development

 Programme.

 USAID: United States

Many of these projects aim to build on the indigenous knowledge of the wane asi in order to identify and strengthen "participatory community-based climate change adaptation planning processes" [82]. The Solomon Islands Red Cross, for example, facilitated vulnerability and capacity assessments on several artificial islands in Lau and Langalanga. It found that "access to usable water is a major problem due to increasing salinization of local water tables caused by rising sea levels" [83], and subsequently donated rainwater storage tanks to several communities. The United Nations Development Program implemented the Strongem Waka lo Community fo Kaikai (Strengthening Communities for Food Security) project, which organized community meetings to assess the impacts of climate change, physically mapped projected sea-level rise by placing red pegs 1 m above the high-water watermark to raise people's awareness of climate change, and distributed vegetable seeds [84]. And the Community Resilience to Climate and Disaster Risk Project of MECDM conducted scoping visits in twenty communities in Langalanga Lagoon and on Small Malaita to develop community-based disaster risk management plans.

But, despite this grassroots rhetoric, most CCDRM projects remain strongly donor-driven and technocratic, and participatory processes are highly manipulative [85,86]. It is perhaps not surprising that when consultants for the Coping with Climate Change in the Pacific Island Region project visit a village, people will identify climate change as a problem in order to secure rainwater storage tanks, seeds, building materials, training opportunities, and other forms of support. People's experiences with the Coastal Community Adaptation Project (C-CAP) project on Malaita illustrate the problems of many CCDRM projects. At the start of the project, the national media reported extensively on the USD 17.9 million grant to support local-level climate change interventions in 77 villages in nine Pacific Island countries. On its website, MECDM reported that USD 65,000 would be available for each of the ten villages selected on Malaita, including five saltwater communities in Langalanga Lagoon and two artificial islands in East Malaita. In all these communities, C-CAP facilitated a participatory process to "identify current and projected climate change impacts, map existing community infrastructure assets, and prioritize infrastructure-related adaptation needs" [87]. The project then contracted a construction company to place four 50,000 L polyethylene water storage tanks in all these villages (see Figure 11). In Oibola, for example, C-CAP placed four tanks. Here, people appreciate the new drinking water system and make intensive use of it, but people also know that a rainwater storage tank costs around USD 1700 and question what happened with the budget of the ministry. Clearly, people understand that the construction, transport, labor, and administration costs need to be included, and that these costs are relatively high in Solomon Islands. They have much less sympathy for the costs of the scoping visits, consultants, participatory maps, community workshops, and climate change adaptation plans. After all, people already know what the problems are in their village, and that the project would eventually provide a rainwater storage tank.

**Figure 11.** Rainwater storage tank on Kwai Island (J. van der Ploeg, 2017).

People on the artificial islands strategically link their needs and priorities to climate change issues to gain access to development aid. In the words of Simon Foale [88], people simply "play along" to obtain hand-outs and cargo. As a result, climate change is directly linked in the public perception to development aid. In many villages, this has fostered aid dependency and clientelism, or what is locally sometimes labelled as a "hand-out mentality" [89]. This opportunistic rent-seeking behavior explains, to a large extent, why villagers consistently report that climate change is threatening their livelihoods. Another reason is that local perceptions and worldviews are increasingly influenced by global discourses [90]. The wane asi read newspapers articles, watch movies, browse the web, and check Facebook, and they use this information to contextualize and give meaning to their daily experiences. Modern education, urbanization, information technology, and mass media often depreciate ecological knowledge and traditional coping strategies, and promote modern solutions for environmental problems, a process that CCDRM projects, often unintentionally, reinforce [91,92].

By focusing on anticipated climate change impacts, such as sea level rise, most CCDRM projects divert scarce government resources and capacity from more urgent environment and development problems, and risk undermining the efforts of coastal communities to address these problems [92,93]. CCDRM projects typically target only a few opportunistically selected communities, thereby fostering political clientelism and opportunistic rent seeking. Externally-funded projects typically neglect the limited capacity of the national government, by-pass provincial and customary governance structures, and promote capital intensive interventions, which makes it impossible to sustain or scale-out these interventions. Much funding is siphoned off through institutional overheads, consultants, inception meetings, and training workshops. In the end, very little reaches vulnerable communities [81]. The mismatch between publicly announced climate funds and the actual activities on the ground fuels suspicion of malversation and corruption, and often causes friction between villagers, project staff, and government officials. This is particularly problematic because international climate funding often takes place at the expense of existing development aid and in a context of deteriorating public services, state-sponsored resource extraction, political patronage systems, and a history of failed development projects [94]. Health care, education, infrastructure, and other basic government services in the rural areas remain very poor, despite ambitious government plans and substantial international development aid after the civil unrest in 1999–2003 [95]. As a result, people have become deeply cynical of the ability of the government and development organizations to improve conditions [96,97].

Moreover, many proposed community-based adaptation measures, such as building rainwater storage tanks, farming corals, raising awareness, and establishing homegardens seem woefully inadequate for the projected impacts of climate change [98,99]. In a certain way, many investments of CCDRM projects in water systems, relocation, or agriculture weaken traditional coping mechanisms such as mobility, autonomy, communal labor, and livelihood diversity that have enabled saltwater people to adapt to environmental change.
