August 15, 2022 — Richard Pollnac has taught students to consider the “human dimension” of the oceans for decades. He’s focused his research on coastal societies in various regions across the world with a sharp eye on community resilience, vulnerability, and what the ramifications of climate change could be on these places.
That teaching has paid off, and Pollnac, a professor emeritus at the University of Rhode Island, was recently flown out to Australia by a former student who graduated in 2000 to join in on a study on the human factor of marine and coastal ecosystems.
Joshua Cinner, the former student, is now a distinguished professor and social science research leader at James Cook University in Australia. In his study, which was published in Nature Communications, he found that tropical regions are expected to suffer losses in fisheries and agriculture as the effects of climate change increase.
Pollnac: Losses due to climate change in the tropics are expected to impact both agriculture and fisheries, but assessments have rarely taken into account changes to both sectors at the same time. The few that have are at the national scale which fails to determine if the people simultaneously engage in both sectors; that is, do they have the ability to substitute emphasis on one sector when the other declines.
Joshua Cinner — one of my best past students at URI — was the principal investigator in this study, managed to pull together a global team of 28 social scientists and climate impact modelers to investigate potential impacts of climate change on agriculture and fisheries for 72 coastal communities across Tanzania, Madagascar, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, and the Philippines. The research integrated socioeconomic surveys from [more than] 3,000 households with model projections of losses to crop yield and fisheries catch under a high carbon dioxide emissions scenario and a low emissions scenario.