“Overlooking Small Island Nations: Urgent Need for Climate Change Models”
An international team of climate change experts has highlighted a critical oversight in global climate models that are used to help nations prepare for the impact of climate change. In an editorial comment published in Nature Climate Change, the team emphasizes the urgent need for higher resolution models of small island nations’ climates to enable them to plan for and adapt to climate change.
Small island states and territories are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, yet current global models often overlook them. The team calls for rapid global and regional cooperation to develop high-resolution projections that are compatible with the scales of small islands. They argue that small island states need more reliable and higher-confidence projections of changes in climate hazards to understand and adapt to the risks they pose to human societies and ecosystems.
At present, global cooperation for regional climate projections is coordinated through CORDEX, which offers resolutions ranging from 50km to 12.5km. However, these resolutions often miss small islands, atolls, and lagoons, particularly in the Pacific Ocean. This lack of accuracy fails to capture the unique climate processes of islands, such as steep mountains influencing rainfall, tropical cyclones making landfall, and specific hydrodynamic processes in lagoons and coral reefs.
The researchers estimate that achieving the necessary projections for most islands will require resolutions at convection-permitting levels (about 1km) nested within larger domains simulated at resolutions in the 10-20km range. Islands surrounded by lagoons will require even higher resolution embedding. The team, which included representatives from Australia, France, Jamaica, New Zealand, and New Caledonia, emphasizes the need for a funded, coordinated, international collaborative effort to ensure that small island states and territories can understand the full spectrum of climate change-related risks.
One of the authors, Professor Jason Evans from the University of New South Wales Climate Change Research Centre, highlighted examples of the issue, such as Tuvalu not knowing how long droughts might become, threatening fresh water supply, and Noumea not knowing the intensity or duration of future heatwaves, posing health risks that medical services need to adapt to. Evans stressed the importance of training people from small island states to access and use the data appropriately and called for collaboration with wealthier countries that have the necessary resources for modeling.
Overall, the call for more accurate and comprehensive climate change projections for small island nations is crucial for their ability to adapt and mitigate the impacts of climate change. The international community must prioritize the development of high-resolution models to ensure the resilience and survival of these vulnerable nations in the face of a changing climate.