IN-HABIT: Understanding physical limits and governance constraints on reef IslaNd HABITability

This Global Partnerships Seedcorn bid is focused on developing a new research collaboration primarily between UK and Indian scientists. Its primary aim is to start to address the challenge of better understanding the physical risks and limits to the future habitability of the reef islands of the Lakshadweep Archipelago (LA) in the northern Indian Ocean. As with most reef islands, the islands of the LA are inherently vulnerable to sea-level rise, but the question of future habitability is especially pressing in the LA because they support some of the highest rural densities in India (>2,000 people/km2), this representing the highest population density of coral-reef dependent communities worldwide, with 100% of its community within a few kms of the coast. The reefs surrounding the islands in this region, which provide key coastal protection and island-building sediment supply functions, are increasingly threatened locally by rapid human population growth (>6% increase per year), rapidly growing fishing pressure, and poorly controlled (at the local level) infrastructure development. At the same time, population pressures and development threaten both groundwater resources and water self-sufficiency. Understanding the magnitude of change to these key physical limits to island habitability in the LA is thus critical to guide adaptation planning. In the context of these challenges our aims through this partnership are two-fold.

The first is to develop and then establish a framework for understanding the current natural physical limits to island habitability in the LA. We will bring the collective expertise of the PI and international PPs to bear on the question of changing risk from reef ecological change, the consequences for reef growth and island-building sediment supply, and consider the impacts of changing island hydrological regimes. This data will be used to undertake initial mapping of zones of highest physical risk for island habitability. From a longer-term collaborative perspective, we envisage work is this area leading directly to a range of joint PhD and MRes project opportunities for students to work alongside the NCF, as well as the development of grant proposals aligned to exploring, for example, changing coastal wave exposure.

Secondly, in collaboration with a range of other international PPs (see CfS Part 1), we are interested to start exploring how local jurisdiction and governance structures may either aid or hinder island adaptation planning options. There are a range of local political structural challenges in this respect within the LA, which lacks the political autonomy of atoll nations like the Maldives. Rather it sits under subnational island jurisdictions where national development aims do not necessarily align to local concerns. To explore the influence (both positive and negative) of different governance structures across the atoll nations of the world, we will host an interdisciplinary workshop towards the end of year two of the project drawing on the experience from the work in the LA, but also bringing in those with adaptation and policy experience across atoll nations and at different levels of governance. In a longer-term context, we are then interested to use this work as a springboard to seek future funding to work with social scientists to examine, for example, how historical and recent physical evidence of land changes align with the lived experience of island vulnerability.

The issues we seek to address are highly relevant to global scale questions about reef island resilience and adaptation and are thus high agenda topics both in the LA, and across the atoll nations.