Pacific RISA: Building International Adaptation and Resilience to Changing Climate in the Pacific Islands

This project will describe combined extreme events and the related implications for hazard prediction, impact assessment, and adaptation planning in Hawai’i and the US-Affiliated Pacific Islands (USAPI). The research entails an investigation of current knowledge through an examination of literature and interviews with stakeholders, and culminates in the writing of a review paper that contextualizes the compound and correlated extreme events for tropical Pacific Islands. This effort will catalog, characterize, and prioritize combined extreme events in Hawai’i and the USAPI. Specifically, it will identify and classify the various event types, explain the rationale, review key examples, and include a discussion of climate variables and their spatial and temporal dependencies. Events will be categorized geographically and by sector to help inform future research and application needs.