In this project (2022-present) Sarah and Gail have teamed up with Professor Patrick Nunn and Roselyn Kumar.

 

The overarching goal of this project is to develop strategies involving livelihood diversification that will enable people in selected rural contexts in Australia and the Pacific Islands to better cope with future climate variability and with longer-term climate change.  In this project, we document the types of livelihood diversity that can be used as (temporary) strategies for coping with climate variability/change. We also assess the effectiveness of livelihood diversification as a coping strategy in contrasting rural contexts in both Australia and the Pacific Islands, and we identify commonalities and differences in the nature of livelihood diversity for climate coping in Australia and the Pacific Islands in order to assess how livelihood diversity might contribute to strategies for sustainable rural livelihoods. 

 

In rural communities in both Australia and the Pacific Islands, sustainable futures depend to a large degree on people being able to help themselves rather than relying on subsidisation of their activities by others.  This is something that researchers Sarah and Gail have found in their Australian studies, namely that for rural dwellers to cope with the mental and economic impacts of prolonged droughts, it helped for them to diversify their livelihoods through entrepreneurial bricolage for increasing off-farm income at such times. In a similar way, studies from the Pacific Island countries by researchers Roselyn Kumar and Patrick Nunn have shown that dependency on outside cash for climate adaptation is not merely unsustainable (Nunn & Kumar, 2019a) but that it erodes traditional ways of coping (Nunn, Runman, Falanruw, & Kumar, 2017). 

 

We travelled to Fiji in February 2023, and South West Queensland in July 2023 to conduct fieldwork. We will share findings in 2024.

 

See:

 

Casey, S., Crimmins, G., Castro, L. R., & Holliday, P. (2022). "We would be dead in the water without our social media!": Women using entrepreneurial bricolage to mitigate drought impacts in rural Australia. Community Development, 53(2), 196-213. 

Nunn, P. D., & Kumar, R. (2019a). Cashless adaptation to climate change in developing countries: unwelcome yet unavoidable? One Earth, 1, 31-34.  

 

Nunn, P. D., Runman, J., Falanruw, M., & Kumar, R. (2017). Culturally grounded responses to coastal change on islands in the Federated States of Micronesia, northwest Pacific Ocean. Regional Environmental Change, 17(4), 959-971.