Vanuatu: From turtle eggs to hornets, traditional knowledge feeds into resilience plans
From investigating where turtle eggs are buried to how many mangoes are growing in a season, scientists on this southwest Pacific Island are evaluating the accuracy of traditional means of forecasting weather, with the aim of incorporating the most effective ideas into planning to help island communities better prepare for the impacts of climate change and more severe natural disasters, reports Islands Business.
“In some of these remote places, people cannot use mobile phones and there is no radio reception,” Mike Waiwai, a climatologist at the Department of Meteorology and Geo-Hazards in the capital, Port Vila, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. As a result many far flung villages do not receive national weather warnings.
“So they just depend on the wind and the trees and the birds. They depend on their traditional knowledge” to predict the weather, he explained.
Vanuatu experiences one or two major tropical cyclones a year, it has nine active volcanoes and it has daily seismic activity.