Long before the Maui wildfires, scientists across the Pacific were surveying the landscape of risk due to climate change.
A new report out this week, the Fifth National Climate Assessment, outlines the current and projected states of environmental safety for the nation.
Government officials, including the president and Congress, use the report to make decisions and provide funding where needed.
Abby Frazier, a lead researcher for the Fifth National Climate Assessment, is a former Hawaiʻi resident. She worked on climate variability across the U.S.-affiliated Pacific islands for more than a decade before recently taking a position at Clark University in Massachusetts.
She worked alongside a team of 16 authors and dozens of technical contributors to produce the chapter on Hawaiʻi and Pacific islands.
"The catastrophes like what we experienced in Maui are, unfortunately, the kinds of horrible events that may continue to get more common with climate change. And in our chapter, we actually do talk about fire in the Pacific islands. And although wildfires are very problematic in Hawaiʻi, they are actually even worse on other Pacific islands," she said.
The research cites close to 500 scientific articles and sources for this chapter, she said.
"We have a figure that actually shows how the annual percent of total land area that burns every year for Pacific Islands is either equivalent to or, in most cases, much greater than the percent area that burns in the western U.S. states," she said.
Frazier added that the report also discusses actions that are underway — some dating back centuries.
"We need to make people more aware of some of these Indigenous knowledge-based solutions and figure out how we can use these to move forward to strengthen local food security," she said.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Nov. 16, 2023. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
