Climate resilience through sociocultural mobility: Reframing the Pacific's urban informal settlements as critical adaptation pathways

This paper draws upon evidence of informal community resilience in six rural-to-urban migrant communities in two Melanesian capital cities: Port Vila, Vanuatu and Honiara, Solomon Islands. These research findings demonstrate extensive and increasingly codified community structures, hybridising and adapting those found in rural, ‘home-island’, settings, even in ‘mixed origin’ communities.

Despite little effort to support, engage with or understand these structures by development actors and government agencies, they are shown to be critical sources of both cultural and community resilience. Emerging evidence of climate-induced migration within both Melanesia and elsewhere in the Pacific suggests that these learnings can not only play a critical role in supporting climate adaptation pathways within Pacific Island Countries, but that these social and cultural sources of community resilience must be deployed regionally to as a foundational attribute of geopolitical security considerations.