Building better climate adaptation in the Pacific Islands through collective intelligence

Edition #96 James Balzer looks at how existing collective digital government efforts in Pacific SIDS could be scaled towards effective climate action...

Pacific Island nations, due to their geographic and economic vulnerabilities, are on the frontline of the impacts of climate change. Rising sea levels and increasing storm severity are increasingly threatening the physical landscape, and in turn the social and economic security, of all 16 Pacific island countries.

According to the WMO, sea levels have risen approximately 10-15 cm in the western tropical Pacific since 1993, and 5-10 cm in the Central Tropical Pacific over the same period. This has been compounded by increased storm surges, flooding and marine heatwaves.

As these countries attempt to protect themselves against the effects of climate change, data is becoming ever more important. Previous interweave publications, such as our interview with Thomas Abell, indicate a promising trend of enhanced data stewardship and digital government across the Asia-Pacific region. According to Deloitte, 73% of the region’s citizens have noticed improved digital government services since the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, in the context of climate change adaptation, with its cross-sectoral and cross-boundary effects, Pacific islands can stand to benefit from breaking down silos between departments and countries, and focusing on collective intelligence.

Collective Intelligence in the Pacific Islands

The principles of Collective Intelligence (CI) may provide answers for how to achieve data collection in this context. CI is the enhanced capacity created when organizations and people collaborate to mobilize a wide range of information, ideas and insights about a complex issue, often in real time.

Notable examples of Collective Intelligence include China’s City Brain Project, which consolidates data feeds from more than 700 IT systems across different government agencies, and India’s Bhuvan Project, which utilizes data gathered from satellite imagery on transport infrastructure, natural features, and land use to support planning and management.

CI is already being demonstrated through a number of initiatives in the Pacific Islands. The Pacific Data Hub (PDH), administered by The Pacific Community (SPC), acts as a centralized data platform for all Pacific islands to consolidate data regarding climate, population, health and economic statistics. 104 organizations across the Pacific have published data sets to the PDH, and the PDH currently has 753 structured and semi-structured data sets.

The PDH has provided instrumental data dashboards, including the Blue Pacific 2050 Dashboard. This dashboard collects up-to-date information about resource management, climate change impacts and environmental degradation, which informs the key objectives of the Blue Pacific 2050 Strategy.

Likewise, the PDH also hosts the PacificMap, providing reliable data about climate change impacts in the Pacific such as coastal erosion, sea level rise, mangrove health and water quality. This is supported by the Digital Earth Pacific tool, which is an observation tool using decades of open-data to produce “decision-ready products” to identify and analyze data relevant to key climate agreements.

The Pacific is a vast region of Small Island Developing States (SIDS), where it is typically difficult to gather timely and relevant data at a regional level. This underscores the importance of these tools in supporting coherence for climate resilience planning across the Pacific islands, facilitating a regionally integrated approach to evidence-based policy making.

Emphasizing the importance of mixed method approaches to achieve proper CI in the Pacific

But the CI principles at play in the Pacific Islands are still very much work in progress. Key principles of CI include the need for diverse human perspectives in data collection inputs, in addition to citizen-centricity as a way of enabling data empowerment on top of extraction. Failure to demonstrate these principles jeopardizes the legitimacy of CI practices.

In this sense, an over-dependence on top-down quantitative data collection methods can undermine principles of good CI. While the PDH might use strong geospatial and satellite technology, this technology does not embed human-centric insights. Such insights are very important when considering the nuanced socio-cultural impacts of climate change in the Pacific - a core tenet of Loss & Damage principles in the region.

Vanuatu can provide a strong example for better mixed method, human-centric approaches to CI. Its National Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction Policy reflects Collective Intelligence principles, with a Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) framework that combines quantitative metrics on disaster impacts and project outcomes with qualitative community feedback, creating a system that measures adaptation success from multiple angles.

By integrating these various data forms, Vanuatu is able to make better-informed decisions and adjust its strategies based on quantitative progress indicators and qualitative lessons learned directly from communities. This approach builds a feedback loop in which both national policy and community insights shape adaptation priorities.

Reducing inequalities of CI in the Pacific

Unfortunately, there is substantial divergence in data stewardship maturity across the Pacific, and not all countries are as advanced in this field as Vanuatu. The data science pyramid can be used as a benchmarking tool to understand the (im)maturity of data science stewardship in government institutions.

Figure 1 - Data Science Pyramid

While some countries might have strong data collection, movement and storage capacities, their CI capacity will be limited without the ability to aggregate, learn and optimize data.

As a study in contrast to Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands struggles to even collect data, with lackluster digital literacy and connectivity, according to the UNCDF IDES assessment. According to the assessment’s rating scale, digital infrastructure in the Solomon Islands is only rated at 33%, and its digital literacy skills are at 17%. In this sense, it is hard to have genuinely inclusive and diverse perspectives contributing to CI when there are such digital government capacity divides across the Pacific.

To tackle these challenges multilateral agencies, such as UN agencies and development banks, can intervene to level the playing field between Pacific island nations. Capacity building financing, including supporting human and physical resources necessary for stronger CI, is a good start. However, in the longer term, regional bodies such as the Pacific Islands Forum will need to take responsibility to support each member nation. In this sense, Pacific islands must undertake regional responsibility and autonomy in how they manage CI in the context of increasing climate change impacts.