 Mae'r gweithio'n gweithio. Byddwn i'n oed, ond, mae'r gweithio'n gweithio ar y netulôr natural fel y gallwn ar y pr Concept. Mae'r pr concept yn ymlaen i ddefnyddiadol ni'n gwybod ym Llyfrinolau Wrtho'i gwlad wedi bod, llwytho ar y cyffredinol. A'i ddaeth ynglynogi, wrth gan mynd, yn fwy o fach, ymlaen i ddweudd lle을 gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'n gofynio fy nghymru fel y cyfarwch, ydych chi'n 15 mennyddiaeth niforol arnynno'r ddweud, ar gyfer y bydd, yr argyrch, yr argymau ar gyfer y bydd ychydig, ar ysgu, ychydig o'i ceisio, ac rwy'n gweithio ag yr acfer teimlo, rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio yma, ac rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n ddory serio ac Doracy, mae'r ddefnyddiadau iaith ei meddwl yn ei wneud yr aeithio'r hwn o'r ystafell ac yn ymweli'r meddwl. Felly mae'n dweud i ymweli'r cysylltu i'r dod yn ymddi'r credu ar y llai o'i ddweud. Mae'n ddullion o'r ddweud i'r ddweud. Felly ydych yn ei wneud i'n dweud i'n dweud i'r ddweud i'r ddweud i'r 15 munud. Mae'r ddweud i'r manllai'r ddweud i'r methu yng Nghyrch. Fel fyddwch yn oeddi'r cyd-hybu? Rwy'n iawn, fe wedi bod pickledwch. Gweithio'n sy'n gwneud y spheithan, felly pennyddiaeth gweithio yn gweld gweithio a gw entertainment gan fydden cynnyddol Cymru yn gwneud yn gwneud wedi ei dweud. Go ahead! A pray hynny yn gallu ystod o'u cyfrifio. Roedd ystod y spheithan yn Gioesan Tysgr yn ycjaid. Yn ceisio'r cyflwyf i fynd i ddweud yma a byddai'n meddwl i'w gweithio. Mae hyn sy'n cael ei gael y cyfle o'r ffordd o Gymru. Dyma ydych chi'n ei wneud yn gyfer y bydd yma o'r rysg yn y region a rhaglen i Yngyrch. Mae rydyn ni'n gweithio'r cyflwyffordd yn y Pacific. I'm working with Geoscience Australia and we work in partnership with OSE to better understand the risks from natural hazards in the Asia Pacific region. I'm going to talk a little bit about why we do it, our approach, some examples for volcanic eruptions, tsunami and cyclone and give some comparative risks. I'll also talk a little bit very briefly about some of the work that we do in the Asia Pacific region. OSE released a Disaster Risk Reduction Policy in 2009 and basically their goal is to reduce vulnerability and enhance the resilience of countries and communities to natural disasters. So this forms a guideline for how OSE delivers aid programs across the Asia Pacific region. They aim to integrate disaster risk reduction into the aid program so that means for example if they're building schools in Indonesia they make sure those schools are resistant. Strengthening capacity of partner countries to reduce disaster risk so one of the area we engage in here is in understanding the risk. It's very difficult to reduce the risk from natural hazards and climate change if you actually don't understand what those risks are. And supporting enhancing leadership and advocacy in disaster risk reduction and coordinating disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Ultimately to the villager disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation are one and the same thing. It doesn't really matter if your community is destroyed by a cyclone that was a disaster or a cyclone that has been exacerbated by climate change, it's still a cyclone. So understanding how those risks affect communities. So hazard, basically the likelihood and the magnitude of a potentially harmful event that can occur at any location. An earthquake in Alaska where there's nobody living there is just a hazard and quite frankly very few people will care about it other than from a scientific perspective. The issue comes when we add vulnerability and exposure. So if you have a city that experiences an earthquake that can be disastrous. If that city then has inherent vulnerabilities such as very weakened structures that are not able to withstand earthquake shaking then you end up with enhanced risk. So the risk is a combination of the hazard, the vulnerability and exposure. And we can illustrate that in the time rule. One thing we know, we can't control the hazard. You know earthquakes will happen, volcanic eruptions will happen, cyclones will happen, there's nothing we can do about it. But what we can do is reduce exposure. But most importantly what we can do is reduce the vulnerability. So making sure our communities are resilient to natural hazards. Risk in the Asia Pacific region. This graphic is a land scan image which is basically population density across the Asia Pacific. And if you'll notice from this it pretty much looks like Australia is empty in comparison to India for example. So very quickly you can see that these great populations in China, India, Indonesia particularly Java mean that anything that happens in those areas is likely to be high impact to a large number of populations. Can we put on locations of volcanoes? 200 million people in the Asia Pacific live within 50km of the volcano. That means a fairly moderate eruption will disrupt the lives of a lot of people and potentially their livelihoods. Earthquakes, again you see the problem. Same with tsunami, cyclones. So we know we have a problem particularly we have very vulnerable populations in the Asia Pacific region exposed to multitude of different natural hazards. So in 2007 Ozade asked GA to do a study basically to take available information to understand natural hazard risks in the Asia Pacific region. And what we wanted to do was broadly characterize the location of potential consequences of rapid onset hazards. So for example we don't look at drought. And identify countries or regions with the highest risk of natural hazards. What made it unique is that it focused on Australian government or Ozade interests. It was multi hazard and we separated the frequent low impact events from the rare high impact events. And we captured impact in broad terms. But look it was very indicative it was rough as guts but it allows Ozade prioritise when they had no means of prioritising activities in the past. So this was our survey area. We had primary focus countries, countries of interest in secondary focus. And those definitions of countries is in line with the Australian government aid policy as it was back then. It may have changed somewhat. So we assess significantly impacted that means death, injury, potential displacement, significant damage to agriculture, water culture, water, essential supplies. And we also classified catastrophic disasters. Ones that impacted more than 1% of the population. It has been something that the country would unlikely be able to withstand with our significant external aid. So from volcanic eruptions. Many people think that volcanic eruptions are fairly harmless. And in many parts of the world they have been today. But as you can see from the study here volcanic ash is fairly insidious. This is in Rabaul and Papua New Guinea and can destroy a lot. Our analysis showed that places specifically in the Pacific that Papua New Guinea had the chance of a VI4. Similar to the magnitude scale for earthquakes we can look at volcanic eruptions. And a VI4 eruption would be similar to Mount St Hallans or slightly smaller Rabaul and Papua New Guinea. So this pretty high frequency of large events basically. Vanuatu the same, Tonga slightly less. Interesting for Solomon Islands, Fiji and Samoa we didn't have enough data to make an assessment. So in terms of volcanic risks to populations we can pop this chart here. And what's interesting is not surprisingly Indonesia and the Philippines stand out as having very high risks populations. Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Tonga less though. But when we look at catastrophic risks in terms of the percentage impacted this is where the small island nations such as Vanuatu and Tonga can be very severely affected by disasters. So not high numbers but high percentages of their population which would really impact on a country's ability to respond to its own natural disaster. And particularly for the Pacific, disasters impacting more than 1% of the population can be expected at least twice as entry in Vanuatu. So that's very very high recurrence intervals and Vanuatu has historically been very very large eruptions. Solomon Islands could be a similar potential but we don't know enough about the volcanic activity of Solomon Islands to make an assessment. tsunami risk, this is some work that Phil Cummins who's an audience did. And this is doing a very coarse assessment of risks from tsunami and using some metrics around how close populations are to the coastline. This is a very scary looking figure for like the teeth of the Pacific I don't know. But basically these are wave amplitudes. So remembering with the tsunami it's offshore amplitude may seem very small but what happens when tsunamis get closer to shore they show and grow. So 75 centimetres may not seem like a lot but that would be a catastrophic tsunami on the coastline. And as you can see for our Pacific countries we've got very very high risk up through Vanuatu, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea. Remembering of course where the study was pre the recent Tonga Samoa tsunami so once again Phil's accurately predicted tsunami risk. But you can see right across the Asia Pacific it's very high. And for population risks for the Pacific Vanuatu again seems to be very high in terms of percentage impacted. From cyclone as you can see from this figure we get very very frequent cyclones across the Pacific and also across the Philippines. And for the Pacific in terms of ranking for wind hazard, Fiji and Vanuatu are very very high, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea also very high. So we can actually summarise these results for these priority countries or primary focus countries. And you can see that Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu have very very high risk for multiple hazards particularly the geological hazards. But many of the countries have risks from meteorological hazards. What's also telling from this graph is that for many of the hazards we couldn't assess the risk because of lack of data. So our summary findings was that Pacific countries have very high potential for catastrophic disasters. And that the gaps in natural hazard information actually precludes meaningful hazard and risk analysis. So just quickly touching on the work that we do with AusAge, we have a number of programs in the Pacific. We've been working with SOPEC for many years to develop and maintain a tsunami hazard modelling capability. We've got a program in Papua New Guinea that's recently started working with the government of Papua New Guinea to look at tsunami earthquake and volcanic hazards. We have a program in Metropolitan Manila and across in Indonesia we have a number of programs. So these programs are not about geoscience Australia assessing the risks. It's all about us working in partnership with our counterparts in these countries to share information, share expertise and share knowledge to understand these risks. And in the Pacific again this is where Phil Cummins has been involved in. Following the tsunami in Samoa we have some questions. Would a better warning system have helped? Was the public awareness good enough? What more could we do? And following on from that there's some preliminary inundation, tsunami inundation modelling in Tonga, suggesting that in the event of a tsunami there will be substantial inundation and that what we need to do is do detailed tsunami inundation modelling that allows people to prepare for evacuation and land planning. So the study I did was, we did, was very coarse rough as guts. It helps provide some knowledge base but it's no good for evacuation planning, decisions on land use planning. What you need to do is drop that hazard and risk analysis right down to the local level to enable that. So I'm going to be talking about the small historical long-term context for natural hazards in both Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Some pictures there are just of a recent 2005 uplift event on the left here showing from the western province area where you can see that it's raised cold reef beds have been uplifted by more than 1.5 metres. So there's some, the Solomon Islands particularly I think is an incredibly shaky place. I come from Christchurch New Zealand which is also a very shaky place. But this is nothing in comparison with the Solomon Islands in many respects. So I've just got back from the Solomon Islands where I've been collecting lots of tubes of mud. I'll do my best to explain a little bit about what I'm doing there. This is the western province which I think we'll be looking at a bit later just showing the sort of general population densities that the area isn't red with the most population densities and going down to green with less so. This is what I've been working on in Teter Pari here in Mendoza and on the south coast of New Georgia here. But I'm going to be talking about this in the context of both looking at, this is a recent geological map of that particular 2005 earthquake where you had uplifted hits and the big blue dots there were more than 2 metres and the big blue dots is where there's subsidence of around about 1.5 metres. So this is pretty crazy activity and then there was another earthquake in 2009 which caused a large tsunami and then there was similar uplift in subsidence of the hits on Teter Pari and Mendoza where I've been working. So what I've been doing is going out and collecting sediment cores. This is actually a completely different project in a sense. I'm still looking at similar things but we're in the sense of looking at natural hazards but more on a long term scale so these are one of a set of about 10 lakes which I've been working on. I should say the full of crocodiles, you can't see them there but we could which we're collecting these sediment archives and this is all a native of a project looking at long term climatic patterns. We're looking at algal lipids which we can use as a proxy for looking at rainfall changes in the past. So this is a crocodile that had been killed off by the Ramsey Australian Police Force though they're the only ones who have guns these days and so they have a program to actually try and reduce the numbers of crocodiles in these areas but that's just nothing much to do with this talk but anyway. So I'm going to be racing through and so one of the key programs with that particular project is looking at extreme rainfall events and the Solomon Islands is very interesting in many respects because it's quite vulnerable to El Nino. I'm not going to talk about that in detail because this is one of the three talks that I've got. This is an image of the fire storm that prevailed over the western Pacific and southeast Asia during 1997. It misses the Solomon Islands but there was a similar effect in many parts of the Solomon's as well where you had large scale fires due to extreme drought and so this is what we're interested in here. This is some work I've been doing with a colleague from Washington University in Seattle and he's looking at rain gauges which are these lakes essentially that have built up these algal mats which we can look at as proxies of changing rainfall and what he's shown is that within the last 500 years you've had extreme shifts of this band of high rainfall here. You've got up to four metres of rainfall, four to five metres in the areas of pink that you see there crossing the Pacific and that includes also parts of the Solomon's as this pun that comes out and overlaps the Solomon's and goes out towards Fiji. But what happened about 500 years ago it seems that this whole band shifted by about five to six hundred kilometres further south. So it happened within the space of around 50 years. Suddenly you had one area of where Washington Island is which had previously had up to about four metres of rainfall and suddenly that shifted to only having about a metre of rainfall and you can kind of imagine what kinds of consequences this might have had on local populations at the time having said that Washington Island was abandoned about 700 years ago by the first settlers of that island. So what we do is we go round and collect lake cores and we look for lipids and we can construct quite detailed diagrams. This is probably the second of the three talks that I'm going to give but the kinds of things we look at are these album bands that you see here and the isotopic data which tell us about changing rainfall patterns and we can radiocarbon date these and it tells us a lot about how things have changed. Okay, so moving on from there. Now one of the other interests that I have getting on to the third talk is looking at the last thousand years and adaptations thereof of indigenous people across different parts of the Pacific looking at the effects of natural events such as cyclones, earthquakes, volcanism but also more abrupt and long-term changes such as sea level and climatic change and broader ecological changes. So I'll move through and I'm interested in how this sort of fits in with the modern context such as the millennium development goals and how people have actually adapted and what kinds of boxes we can take that we can actually address using the historical sciences as well so we can look at things like environmental sustainability perhaps we can look at what the effect of disease might have been and so on and so forth but basically there's only a few things that we can potentially address from these particular goals but these are worth focusing on and I think the number one is poverty hunger and hunger in the past as well we can look at how societies have sustained themselves despite hello, it's disappeared, why is that? Here it goes, I think I should keep moving and so how societies have sustained themselves and one of the key things there is looking at well the development of agriculture in these regions as well as perhaps the main mechanism which can alleviate poverty and hunger and sustained food security but then we have to look at these other effects of more general processes that societies go through that affect development and where in this sense I'm asking whether in fact people are perhaps the biggest problem to development as opposed to any other kind of natural hazard because it appears just an image of Chinatown and Honearo in the event of 2006 and so how can we disentangle the effects of humans and natural hazards so that's the core question here and on the surface it seems that people are adapting fairly well in many parts of the world but increasingly you have to deal with quite strange people like myself in remote communities in Papua New Guinea so my main role is digging into the past so I spent a lot of time usually beyond my knees and mud digging up sediments and trying to extract fossil traces which actually tell us about how the environment's changed and how people might have been influencing that change and this is from a bog in the highlands of Papua New Guinea and so if you can't address your question then my theory is you should just dig deeper and that's exactly what I do so one of the key things we have to do that I've been working with a group from a target university in New Zealand is looking at human adaptation over the long term and one of the interesting things about some parts of high elevation areas of Papua New Guinea is that we know that people have been living there for the past 49, in this case, to 44,000 years and this is a cossipi swamp here this is an airstrip and you can see a village in the background and this whole landscape is built upon a volcanic landscape there was an eruption around 50,000 years ago which deposited up to 3 metres in places of volcanic ash and there's pretty well no way that anyone could survive that but on top of those sediments you find a rich array of stone tools and artefacts which suggest that people were... and in fact you can almost look at any part of the landscape you can dig a hole and you'll probably find a stone tool like this this is what we were finding working at Cossipi Swamp so this is the brown layer here you can see which is the ash layer and embedded within that is a whole bunch of stone tools and artefacts so this is a pretty seriously transformed landscape which people are doing quite well and we can look at different fossil traces which represent people's manipulation of certain plants starchy foods and so on which they're extracting from that landscape so it's not just in that particular context but we've got other evidence where for example on the Huon Peninsula in the eastern part of the main chain of public you can see these raised terraces which have been driven up by earthquakes over the last 250,000 years and we're finding stone tools actually scattered across layers which show that basically people were occupying that area around 40,000 years ago as well so again it's like so you've got volcanism and earthquakes and so on but these records have been used for a number of other things but I'm running out of time one of the key things that we're looking at as archaeologists in Papua New Guinea is looking at agricultural development as I was saying so one of the things we can look at is how that's developed and this is in Cook Swamp in the highlands of Papua New Guinea where it seems that people were creating drainage ditches in boggy sediments to drain them to establish root crop agriculture but the other striking thing about this site and here's some other areas of agricultural land in different parts of the highlands of Papua New Guinea is that here's a sediment core taking through different parts and different sections surrounding the Cook Swamp area in the highlands where you can see the yellow bands which represent significant layers of volcanic ash that have been feeding into that site so we've got strong evidence of frequent overtopping in fine ashes but this may actually replenish gardens so in some senses volcanic ashes might be quite helpful whereas in other areas such as in West New Britain we've got examples where it seems that people were moving off of those islands as well moving to other areas and then reoccupying those particular places later on and so there's a bunch of archaeological sequences just showing some of the large volcanoes that exist in that particular region as well so when we've got dates on some of the larger volcanic ashes that existed and then so you see this interceding periods where essentially people are occupying the landscape and then they move off the final thing I was going to talk about was looking at more in the recent term and I'm flicking through to the... this is probably the fourth talk actually this is one of the remote Solomon Islands in the eastern part of the archipelago where it's incredibly vulnerable to things like earthquakes and cyclones in particular and I've got some images of some of the cyclones that the last cyclone that stripped this island bare was a cyclone Zoe in 2003 and it completely stripped the vegetation it was like putting a lawnmower over an island and stripping it bare but no one died on this particular island and they could sustain themselves quite well for the preceding period and one of the interesting facets of Ticopyr this particular island is that people have been living there in these sorts of conditions with frequent cyclones it seems of a periodicity of about ten years they get a category four or five cyclone which completely annihilates their resources but they've been sufficiently independent to be able to develop strategies to deal with this and this is one of the things that I'm working on but it looks like I've run out of time so I'll have to address that perhaps in the discussion session that we'll be having later on on the Solomon Islands thank you very much right so yes we're going to head down a somewhat different track now in terms of the idea of hazards in the Pacific region whilst the background for this presentation is climate change which undeniably presents difficult challenges in the region I'm interested in how in the climate change context problematic moral geographies are created and shaped ones that posit the islands at once as victim and yet dispensable and burden these sites with providing the proof of the global climate change crisis what I'm particularly interested in here is how legal discourses use apparently threatened Pacific Islands as laboratories of legal abstraction or experimental spaces through which legal utopias are imagined, filtered or interpreted creating if you want a kind of moral hazard whereby legal fictionalizing will find its truest expression only should the islands indeed disappear what do I mean by the idea of the islands being used at least metaphorically as spaces of experimentation well the concept of island laboratories or islands as experimental realms has long been implicated in the cultural subjugation of islanders island scholar Beth Green how for example has observed that islands occupy an unusual and privileged place within the history of academia as spaces that echo the ideal conditions of the laboratory somewhat more critically Godfrey Baldicino has pointed out that western fascination with islands is often constituted by the fact that they suggest themselves as potential laboratories for any conceivable human project and thought or action good early 20th century western preoccupations with Pacific islands for example tended to be attended to use what were considered remote undeveloped human colonies scattered across a vast and empty expanse of sea for particular western and usually positivist forms of knowledge generation and I've put up an example there that some of you might be familiar with from Margaret Mead interest in the islands often did not stem from a view of these spaces or their populations as necessarily of interest in their own right but as potential laboratories in which to study models, ideas systems of concern to more complex western or often western societies simultaneously the islands continue to be constructed as sites in which modernity can never be realized providing the backdrop only to satiate western appetite for exotic locations and the simple unspoiled life the TV show survivor may perhaps be a good example of this latter issue how the dynamic of the island laboratory may be playing out again in the climate change contact has been the subject of some analysis briefly the last 10 years have seen a proliferation of increasingly dramatic rhetoric and imagery of disappearing islands portrayed as apparently on the verge of evacuation with island populations in imminent danger of becoming so-called climate refugees I'm sure many of you have kind of followed such discourses in the popular media as well Al Gore's famous documentary that came out in 2006 called an inconvenient truth is one of several instances in which the disappearance of at least some Pacific islands as inhabitable spaces is portrayed as an event already in the past he was particularly concerned about the islands of Tuvalu partly with horror and partly with perverse impatience we're all invited to watch often from a distance for the first island to disappear in a sense the islands are thus enlisted to help visualise the often complex and intangible climate change phenomenon more cynically however it is clear that the goal perversely may not be the saving of the islands themselves but planetary salvation the islands are recruited to prompt non islanders to act on climate change and have become the poster child to caution about the excesses and sins of western consumer capitalism they may even be framed as an acceptable sacrifice in efforts to prove that climate change is real should they disappear nothing seems as cynical a resolution as trying to recreate them with the waste products of western culture or the very products implicated in generating global warming in the first place in the case that I have put up on the screen a Dutch enterprise has proposed to use plastic waste products to repurpose floating exotic island spaces for example what interests me in all this is the role played by law or perhaps rather legal discourse which curiously appears to await the demise of island nations rather impatiently in the words of one legal scholar and I've put the quote up there predictions of whole countries disappearing Atlanta style beneath beneath the waves raises fascinating legal issues this kind of sentiment is shared particularly by international lawyers the kind of people amongst to my work the fascinating legal questions anticipated by such scholars tend to evolve around three areas of inquiry all interconnected of course firstly the loss of territory secondly questions of sovereignty and statehood and finally the issue of migration territory in a sense that due to sea level rise territory would likely be shrinking and with it inhabitable land and maritime boundaries sovereignty and statehood is an issue in a sense that uninhabitable or sinking islands may struggle to continue to fulfill the criteria for statehood and migration is part of this discourse in a sense that it is sometimes posed as the only remaining option for at least the inhabitants of the very low lying islands remember that in the case of an inconvenient truth several islands are apparently already evacuated where we return to the idea of the islands as experimental spaces or laboratories of interest to international lawyers is in the barely disguised fact that islands threatened by climate change represent the perfect opportunity to test out the notion of the de-territorialized state and Western cosmopolitan hopes for a post-Westphalian international order one historically so strongly tied to the existence of territorially defined nations as one international lawyer has put it sinking islands provide the perfect opportunity to dissolve the notion of the territorially bound state but experimentation does not stop there legal minds and others have been busy suggesting various pathways through which the de-territorialized state could continue to exist first for example we have the suggestion of simply sticking a lighthouse type tall structure on existing islands that would serve as a sovereignty marker of a kind should whole island nations later be submerged legal minds have also suggested that the loss of sovereignty could be prevented simply by building sea defences around an island perhaps more an engineering than a legal solution the problem here may be the prohibitive cost of such an arrangement the second or bottom photo I've put up there is of the Japanese outpost and I'm going to probably mispronounce this of Okinaw Torishima a set of rocks the Japanese government spent three billion US dollars to protect and order to claim as part of its territory thereby extending its exclusive economic zone significantly finding the resource to make this a viable scheme for the Pacific islands facing sea level rise is rather doubtful another legal utopia sometimes advanced includes the idea that if territory of an island nation becomes uninhabitable land could perhaps be bought or ceded by another nation elsewhere where the state would then continue to exist of course the problem with this issue is that even if such a deal could be worked out land ceded would likely be completely devoid of any use or purpose it would be marginal not arable without infrastructure and natural resources in other words expendable to the nation that would cede or sell it the Pacific region is of course not devoid of experience with this sort of arrangement I'm thinking here for example of the resettlement of Benaba Island as after World War II to the Fiji and Island of Rabi ongoing problems experience with land right citizenship financial hardship and of course loss of culture identity and language should further caution us against seeing this as a viable solution my personal favorite and perhaps the most near colonial of them all emerged from a recent conference on threatened island nations in New York international lawyers there debated in all seriousness the possibility of the resurrection of a kind of trusty ship system that would support governments in exile despite the fact that in the past Pacific Islander experience with this had been far from positive permitting as it did for example the nuclear testing carried out in the Marshall Islands in the 1940s to 1960s right so what do we make of all this my talk has not been about suggesting that climate change does not present real challenges and hazards for the region I am also not suggesting that law does not have a role to play in resolving such challenges my concern is rather that a moral hazard is created when disappearing islands function as little more than a kind of laboratory in which western cosmopolitan hopes anxieties and utopias are nurtured the legal discourse implicated in this has had little regard for law's historic role in rationalizing the expansion of western nations into the life spaces of other peoples or laws role in creating the very conditions that may now threaten islands or indeed the priorities of islanders as opposed to island states themselves a weird dichotomy has been created between wanting to save the islands and keenly anticipating the disappearance because it would allow us to take debates out of the realm of legal abstraction although the Pacific Islands are undoubtedly the recipients of our compassion to Valu is the real deal as the photo exemplifies up there the question that beckons is whether they matter in their own right thank you okay okay well I didn't quite know what the other speakers were going to be presenting on so I can see now that to give you some perspective there's been those previous talks were quite global or regional in their perspective what I'm going to talk about is a practical example of planning which is involving hazard risk management in a fairly localised area and it's in East New Britain in Papua New Guinea and East New Britain isn't really being the current and present risk isn't exactly climate change although that's a longer term risk obviously but there was a large eruption there in basically a volcano right behind or right beside the main town of Rebell which is a port which was established in the early 1900s and although there was an eruption there in the 1930s which was pretty damaging or near there the township continued to grow and it became very important to not only East New Britain province but the nearby provinces but the thing about East New Britain is that it itself because of the history the geological history of volcanic eruption had beautiful deep ash soils ideal for agriculture so it really tended to bring a lot of people in around the eruption area so more recently as Alana was talking about there's been a project centred on capacity building for natural hazard planning and that's actually ongoing and I'll be going up with some other people at the end of this month to continue that process so we're talking here about something that's actually in the process of formation with the provincial government the provincial government on its own behalf have just completed a 10 year development strategic plan but not yet with the input so much the formal input of the natural hazard management work so that's a bit toxic but I'll say it had just completed a study well it was a study I did actually which was on road infrastructure and development in that eruption landscape so things have come from different points of view that's a real life policy situation rapidly God knows how I can do it really but I'll talk about some of the socio-economic pattern so you can see what the context of trying to plan for risk minimisation is some of the prevailing ideas among the provincial government which may and may not be useful how maybe we'd think about introducing risk management to the situation maybe challenging some of the provincial government's previous assumptions and I'm going to ask a question at the end about whether there might be some different strategies to thinking about hazard reduction the one thing I would say about East New Britain is it's a fairly large province but most of the population actually live in quite a small area and that's that area right next to the volcano because of the rich agricultural landscape and industries that are built upon that you're getting a situation where more people want to come into the province that's one of the wealthier parts of Papua New Guinea there's a lot of desperate parts of Papua New Guinea so more people want to come into that part of the province you're getting intensification right next to this hazard yeah okay there's a volcano but hey you know that could blow up anytime who knows I'm hungry now so intensification sort of driven by matters of the belly rather than sort of rational ideas from the head yeah and the rest of the province is out there it's quite empty, it's depopulating it's very poor and those maps one is showing up in the northeast corner that large population concentration, the second map where it's blue you can see people are moving away where it's red people are moving in so apart from the evacuation around the actual volcano site itself which is blue in the top right hand corner so there was evacuation there from the actual township of Rabaul but nearby especially in this valley called the Waringoi Valley people are moving in and intensifying whereas further away in the rest of the province people are moving out it's just too poor to go into the area near the volcano so there's a challenge for the provincial government I won't go into those economic zones it suffers to say you can see a gradation from the wealthy area right near the volcano where the rich agricultural lands are right through to agriculturally poor parts in the remote parts of the province the economic context that the province has to deal with in this map you know it's an evidence driven study so we've got data and mapped it you can see production of cocoa I think I can use this thing to show where the volcano is there that's where the eruption site is okay so cocoa is not growing around here because there's a lot of hills there the actual volcano is more or less around the town but in the rest of the area there's these volcanic soils so that's where people are getting their income from and you know it's in the volcanic risk region cocoa, oh don't worry about that one actually fresh produce well it's a similar sort of a thing people are coming in from areas nearby around the volcanic eruption area and copper or the other crop is similar sort of a thing you can see the agricultural production is really concentrated in those volcanic areas I won't worry about that slide now so some sort of process of planning for eruption has been happening since the 94 volcano and what they basically did after that volcanic eruption they said okay well we've got two goals one is to restore the economy trying to piece it together as it was because things were laid waste in what was then the provincial capital of Rabaell but the other thing is what do we do about future eruptions well let's try and relocate as many people as possible so they relocated the town to the other side of the active caldera which is sort of a half okay idea it doesn't really get them out of the the overall risk zone but I suppose it does get people out of the very highest risk zone relocating rural populations further away and then using roads and so on to try and restore linkages so that's what they did but here's a map of it so there's the eruption that pink is basically the asphalt so you can see the asphalt distribution you can see here what were defined by a geologist's zone of likely future eruptions so that's sort of the danger area the highest danger area but there's also an ash hazard zone which is this dotted line and the current provincial town which has been redeveloped there's sort of on the edge of that so it's not really out of the eruption zone and these yellow parts are where people were supposed to resettle but the problem was with that early phase of planning the current situation in 1994 was in a valley have an urban population some near urban populations with some agricultural land market garden type stuff and they got relocated some urban people rural people got relocated further away in the inland of the Gazelle peninsula without much agricultural land and they didn't actually like that especially those rural people they didn't like that so a lot of those people just moved back into the eruption zone because they're getting hungry so they go back to their old land they can grow stuff yeah, it might blow up but hey, you've got to live for the day too whereas maybe what they could have done you know, urban population and your periurban areas you try and recreate that a bit in the urban centre the new urban centre and if you've got to move people further away give them agricultural land that's what they live on but you know, there's a rushed process things weren't thought through properly so it didn't really work out too well the current version of planning is that people should move even further away and it's based on idea of growth centres and corridors I won't go through these but here's a map there's a cockpaw and these are these growth centres that are proposed and then some roads, proposed roads going down to more population growth centres problem is that kind of planning I ask them but hang on roads themselves don't cause development the basic point of an agricultural society like yours is you've got to have agricultural opportunities that's the only reason people move to a place they can grow stuff and eat it and sell it they'll move there but just by putting a road down to some place doesn't mean they'll go oh, there's a road, let's move down to whatever place and there's really not much agricultural opportunity so it's a bit of a kind of a doubtful plan they've got really and some of it's just natural constraints you know, this rainfall great where the current population is hey, that's why they're there great soils, great rainfall gets increasingly worse as you go down through the provinces why people aren't there it's why they're moving away you're not going to get people to move back to those places crop potential is really high where people live it's low where people don't live it's not rocket science cocoa potential is similar so I'm going to skip over these things too the problem for the province is this idea that maybe if we can try and move everybody away that'll be the best thing but it's not going to work because the conundrum is your most productive area the people where people want to live is right on that volcanic ash deposit that's where people want to live you're prone there to eruptions because also earthquakes are associated with it you're prone to tsunamis especially just along the coast are people living right on the coast like really flash ones big earthquake right next to that eruption area bang, you're covered with water but on the other hand you can't really get away from that area without collecting the economy if you move away from those agricultural areas if you say all those shops and infrastructures hey it's just too risky we'll move into a much lower risk part of the province but there's nothing to do there there's no agriculture so people are stuck there and you've got to find this balance and that's what the planning is all about now there've been these competing solutions there's been that process which I was partly showing you those maps of the different sorts of production across the landscape trying to use that kind of economic landscape analysis looking at cost benefit of various infrastructure schemes to find feasible options but we know that the bottom line is that people won't live where they can't grow crops if it's an agricultural society so unless someone comes up with a real brainwave about some new agricultural opportunity you're stuck with people being where they are building roads and so on to other parts of the province won't work and this is the thing this is where the anthropology I guess comes in you're looking for what is it for common people to think about just the ordinary person living in that area are they thinking and they are basically thinking that it's better to live with that natural risk than to risk reducing your living standard by following the provincial government's ideas that will move away to other unproven places and you know living with risk there's a whole heap of things in people's minds about that there's their understanding of history where their ancestors have come from there's understanding of their cultural response to risk and what happens about even sort of things about life and death about how you would die if you die in a volcano what does that mean if you're living on your ancestral homeland and economic aspects people are living there because of those opportunities you have to accept that I'm getting a hurry up I'm not going to finish this in New Britain we're thinking about a risk overlay concept so looking at the economic context of landscape and looking at the risk zoning and then overlaying those two and doing that at a very localised level looking at that for particular functions trying to avoid a lot of economic distortion by using this sort of overlay concept but ultimately trying to balance risk versus amenity and that's what we're trying to do so that's the ongoing process which will be continuing later this month there we are thank you we've kept very well at the time so perhaps we've got time for a few questions and we've got half our tea break so if anybody's got some questions there's one at the back there any of the speakers are we going to do mobile thingies carry them around you need to use that to respond that's right my question is specifically directed to Fanny but we were dealing with international law the concept of law and climate change and certain parts of displacement and all that there have been several articles written over the past few years regarding the red definition of the convention and refugees and a strong argument is that we cannot really fit climate change displaced people into the definition of refugees because the 1951 convention is very strict as regards the qualifications the five qualifications and that certain scholars would place it in a way that because the 1950s was a period of political dissonance and a lot of issues were politically based it was a response at that time do you subscribe to the idea that we need to redefine or at least that the United Nations should at least be able to redefine or put the new spin to the whole idea of a refugee to accommodate environmental refugees complex issues to find an answer in two minutes first of all the idea of perhaps we need to alter the refugee convention isn't the only idea out there in terms of trying to find a treaty based response to this there are also ideas out there that say why don't we have protocol on climate refugees to the United Nations to make a convention on climate change why don't we develop a whole new convention that separately deals with this issue but there are problems with all of those for just in fact the theory I just mentioned the one that tries to argue that we have some kind of amendment to the original protocol to the refugee convention is perhaps the weakest one in fact even though it has received the most attention and team sort of the most logical place to look for a place to fit climate refugees but it is probably the most appropriate space of all not just because the convention has only five arms on which you can base on which you can base the refugee came also the convention for persecution and we can't necessarily say that's a nice tool on climate change but we can't say in a straightforward way that such a person has been persecuted they're lying for one of the five reasons and questions so a lot of the current thinking in international law is that let's move away from this idea that we have a treaty based response there are a lot of other instruments softball instruments and let's try and strengthen those for example through the United Nations I have a question to the first speaker sorry I can't read your name you are just talking about the disaster in Asia Pacific region so I have two very quick but related questions first one is while measuring the impact whether you are just considering the people who are just directly affected maybe with the tsunami or any other disaster or maybe the total number of people who are affected within three or six months because of the lack of food or clean water this kind of thing this is my first question and the second question is that whether just measuring the most vulnerable country whether you are just thinking giving all countries the equal way or whether you are just considering in terms of the total number of people affected because if you just think about the small countries in the Asia Pacific island maybe the Solomon island but if you just consider another for example Bangladesh or India maybe one percent impact maybe better than the ten percent impact in other small countries so these are my two questions thank you so for the first one a total of impact was very good to define typically in disasters people in disaster situations they would be on holidays sometimes injuries sometimes economic loss and we felt that connection was called a spectrum of disaster impacts such as people that are at this place for long periods of time such as after often interaction and as young people can return for ten years or so so our definition was much broader and then include people that are at this place people who may lose access to basic services such as electricity and so on so there was a much broader definition of impact that was typically used in reporting and that was largely due to our target audience being Aussie which they can be rolling in and that is supporting people into the recovery and development and as for the second question the measure for the one percent affected being in Australia was around a country's ability to respond itself so in the year for example one percent of the population used to have 99% of the population of the government that may be un-affected that can then mount to a response independently from that in Australia for a small island nation one percent of the population affected may really disrupt the government's ability to support itself and therefore you will need external support from agencies of NGO so I'm going in some round why is it important for Isabella is it why you sort of use those interests have an answer to your question well Aussie has now decided that a country like Tuvalu can't support itself even if it hasn't got any disasters even if everything's normal we have another one here I have a question from Mr Matthew there's some slides that you have skipped when you're doing your presentation but I caught you it's about the PNG people who respond to C.L.B. Rice about 44,000 years ago and does it imply that C.L.B. Rice has been a problem since that long time ago and if yes could you tell me the reason please because at that time I'm sure that the greenhouse gas emissions is not that high no there's no evidence of C.L.B. Rice actually 44,000 years ago effect there's evidence quite an opposite there's evidence of C.L.B. Rice between around 26 and 18,000 years ago where it dropped by about 120 metres so it's quite the opposite effect and that was during the last ice age when much of the water was actually sent on the poles and attacked it there in the Arctic so quite quite the opposite effect but having said that there is some evidence within the last 6,000 to 4,000 years that in fact in some parts of the PNG C.L.B. Rice up to around 2 metres higher than that present as well so that's going back much in a few thousand years ago but we actually don't know quite what the effect was and we know this has had some effect in other parts of the Pacific such as in the Tour de Morte de Arc du Paligur where in fact a lot of those islands only actually became exposed within the last 2,000 years or so became available for occupation so on the long term geological perspective of things I think but it's quite a good perspective to have in terms of adaptation as well thanks for your question One more, two more, two more and then we'll have tea break I think we'll see, yeah My question is for Ian you mentioned something about finding a balance between amenities and the risk in the higher risk areas can you elaborate on possible remedies as to how the government can balance that amenities and risk Yeah okay I think what we'll be looking at at the end of the month will be trying to categorise what the vulnerability would be for different sorts of amenities so for example the current hospital that's still there is right in that volcanic zone where the eruption was in 1994 it still hasn't been relocated so there's a question about where to relocate it to and one idea was to put it away from the volcanic eruption area in fact right down the other coast where it would be hard to be able to get to but it would be on the coast so if you look at the criteria of tsunami risk if there was a tsunami generated within the caldera it may not have had time to grow but because it would possibly be powerful it could just wipe out the hospital that would be the first thing to go before even the rest of the population got affected the hospital's gone so that's probably another good idea and maybe it's an example of why you basically put a risk overlay on low-lying parts of the coast to say well you can't put a central services right on the coast you wouldn't put an emergency response centre on the coast it would get wiped out by a tsunami but on the other hand if you say well I'll just play it really safe and put all these important amenities way away from the coast and the volcanic activity centre but that would be putting them away from the population too so yeah you've covered risk but say it was the hospital put 50km inland most people wouldn't go to the hospital anymore because it would be too far away so you've got to be able to try and balance the costs for people's everyday transactions without amenity with like the hazards but we're thinking probably the way to do it is to define what sort of amenity and how would it interact with the with the hazards what would happen if it got wiped out housing for example if people live on the coast which a lot of people do it's not great but if that's the personal decision or they don't have any options and the government can't do anything about it well I don't know that's something for the those people at that planning workshop especially for people from East New Brick to think about what about the scenario of those fatalities but on other things such as government sponsored amenity emergency response hospitals and things like that there's probably an obligation that they need to zone those things so that they're not put in in high risk places and yet there's a mechanism to ensure they're not put in places which removes their amenity entirely one more question because then otherwise we'll run out this question is to panel congratulations it was a wonderful presentation I really loved it actually my question is between things in the sense that we have all experienced historically, sociologically that there has been several kind of intervention from the western world in the underdeveloped and the greater world mostly and so of course it has brought about a lot of past socio-historical changes in different realms but my question to you is that what should we use on individual pregnancy free will and the autonomy in choosing whether the ability to choose or not to choose any kind of outside intervention and what might be the inner deeper level impacts of it on the individual my question is what should we use on the autonomy individual autonomy free will and agency in choosing or not to choose the outside intervention when it is introduced by any outside agency choose or not to choose and what might be the possible impact of it during that process when that happens now I mean I guess my question is are you talking about literally at the individual person level are you talking about the individual identity level or when I'm talking about the individual I'm talking about the individual as a person I mean the individuals and groups and the individual's identity aspect I mean I guess in a way the point of my presentation really was in a way what your question is about that law has kind of ignored that dimension it has been solved down first like we know what we will need and there has been too little questioning about the world law can actually play or should play on the ground so I guess that is perhaps the more the analysis needs to have the environment in the sort of theoretical realm going to places perhaps along the lines of what Ian was talking about where people are doing me to review and investigate the needs there and see what the world law and the way I'm not necessarily going to change that but I think that is...