Advancing climate change monitoring in the Pacific Islands Countries and Territories through household surveys

Noumea

No country is immune to the impacts of climate change, much less the Pacific Island Countries and Territories (PICTs). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's most recent report indicates that climate change will likely increase the frequency and intensity of natural disasters in the Pacific Region, significantly increasing the exposed population to coastal inundation. The impacts on human and economic activities, therefore, will likely increase.

The climate crisis is inequitable. Despite PICTs' minimal contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), the Pacific's high vulnerability could lead to widespread food and water insecurity, increased health risks, lack of access to social services and even forced displacements.There is little information however on the impact of potential climate change and the adaptation strategies = at household and local levels. This could compromise the effectiveness of national adaptation plans (NAPs), disaster risk reduction plans and other mitigation- and adaptation-related targets and commitments, which depend on the availability of high-quality data.

To fill this data gap, the Statistical Innovation and Capacity Building in the Pacific (PACSTAT) project, implemented by the Pacific Community (SPC), was established to improve the quality of data collection and accessibility to comparable data in the PICTs. One component of the project is the development of a Climate Change and Natural Disasters Survey Module, which will allow the collection and use of climate change and natural disaster data in population censuses and household surveys.

The first step in the development of the Module was answering the question: What should be measured in a survey module on Climate Change and Natural Disasters in the PICTs? To respond to that question, SPC’s Statistics for Development Division (SDD) researched the current and projected characteristics of climate change and natural disasters in PICTs and their impacts on households and communities. This included a literature review of global Population and Housing Censuses, the World Programme for the Census of Agriculture 2020, the LSMS (Living Standards Measurement Study) and LSMS-ISA (Living Standards Measurement Study - Integrated Surveys on Agriculture programmes, the National Socio-economic Surveys in Forestry, the 50x2030 Initiative, specific surveys on climate change implemented by Bangladesh and Nepal, and many other relevant statistical operations collecting climate change-related data.

This review led to some recommendations for the development of the Module and identified the main climate risk factors in the Pacific. The need to define standardized approaches to formulate questions and define response modalities is also highlighted.

SPC's Divisions are contributing to the Module development by participating in internal discussions and sharing their information needs and climate change expertise in the Pacific region. Many SPC's Divisions indicated that they plan to collect information on climate change and its effects at the household level in the coming years, and approximately one-half of Divisions are responsible for monitoring socio-economic-related climate change indicators. In the past, the main challenges faced during data collection processes at the household level were related to long recall periods, high costs of data collection and the complexity of the climate change questions in the survey questionnaires.

The draft Module and the outline of a broader source book, including an extended set of questions by type of socio-economic impact, will be presented to the 10thPacific Statistics Methods Board (PSMB) meeting in October 2022. The next step will be to field-test the proposed methodology, with the aim to include it in the upcoming Tuvalu Long Form Population and Housing Census.

For the PICTs, developing the Climate Change and Natural Disasters survey module comes at a critical time. The information this Module will produce is highly relevant to monitoring indicators proposed by the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) strategic objective on improving the living conditions of affected populations by climate change, including poverty, income, and access to drinking water measurements, as well as many other actions proposed in Article 2 of the Paris Agreement, recently reaffirmed in COP 26.

The survey data will also support monitoring progress towards SDG1, namely target 1.5: Build the resilience of the poor and those in vulnerable situations and reduce their exposure and vulnerability to climate-related extreme events and other economic, social and environmental shocks and disasters; and SDG13 on Climate Action. In addition, the survey module is intended to support countries in reporting some of the indicators proposed in the Framework for the Development of Environment Statistics (FDES 2013) and the Global set of Climate Change Statistics.

SPC would like to acknowledge the contribution of Monica Madrid, Climate Change Statistics Advisor in this work.

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Author(s)

Statistics
Climate Change
UNFCCC
Pacific Methods Board Meeting (PSMB)
Statistics
Climate Change
UNFCCC
Pacific Methods Board Meeting (PSMB)